“Lucille Lang Day’s The Cosmos and Me: New and Selected Poems establishes how essential are her writings in bridging science and verse. The opening poem ‘Counting’ brilliantly creates a new kind of mathematics, ‘One: the moon, / circling Earth, dragging / the oceans like flowing / blue gowns; the human / heart pumping blood…’ Two eyes for depth perception is another of her numbers—and her poems make a third eye for understanding the mysterious cosmos. Her Wampanoag heritage underlies the magic of the poems, which are spells and treatises at once. The collection has eight themed sections, a welcome change from the usual selected poems timeline order. The effect is to have a deep conversation with the entire lifetime of this important poet in a way that renews wonder.”
—Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-2009, author of House of Grace, House of Blood
“Lucille Lang Day’s New and Selected Poems chronicle one of the most interesting transformations in West Coast literary history. Starting as a teenage mother and shoplifter from a hardscrabble working-class family, Lucy Day grew, despite obstacles, into both a scientist and a poet. She also developed a poetic style that could accommodate everything in her extraordinary life experience from her tempestuous early marriages to the hidden structures of the natural world. Full of both intellect and emotion, The Cosmos and Me lives up to its large and lofty title.”
—Dana Gioia, California Poet Laureate 2015-2018, author of Meet Me at the Lighthouse
“’The cosmos surges within us, insistent as time,’ writes Lucille Lang Day…But she also speaks in the voices of a mating snow goose and other creatures, and tells lively tales of family, of bad-girl childhood, delicious sex, three marriages, two daughters, chatty divorces, and—in a word—love. Stacking her poems with irresistible sensory detail, she just can’t stop. Astonishing, formidable, awesome, amazing, breathtaking, are some adjectives that come to mind as I read Lucille Lang Day’s The Cosmos and Me. But also beguiling and playful, intimate and courageous, luminous and wise, and sometimes really funny as well. I feel grateful to have encountered this body of poetry.”
—Alicia Ostriker, New York State Poet Laureate 2018-2021, author of The Holy & Broken Bliss
“Whenever I’m hoping to tease my imagination with the intimacy of delicate, microscopic worlds, or to indulge a sudden impulse to unleash my deep inner yawp to embrace the cosmos, I realize it’s once again time to read one of Lucille Lang Day’s marvelous collections, as her poetry has always captured both of these desires with fierce clarity and a great tenderness. Now, we have fifty years of her work gathered in this deeply moving and powerfully orchestrated new volume, The Cosmos and Me. If poetry is the human science of urgent observation, scrupulous attention, and lyrical song making, then Lucy Lang Day has shown she is truly one of the finest exemplars writing today.”
—David St. John, Chancellor Emeritus, Academy of American Poets, author of Prayer for My Daughter