The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook

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The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook

Poems by Jesse DeLong

Jesse DeLong’s full-length debut, The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, is a collection of poems set among the mines and farmlands of Idaho. The severe landscapes move the speaker to investigate his romantic and familial relationships through lyric considerations of the natural world and scientific concepts. Like the seeds on the face of a sunflower, each poem is both whole and a piece of a whole. Mimicking this structure, or the “struggle of scale,” these poems combine love and science, and the product is both declaration and interruption, elusive and graspable, love and the deconstruction of love. In The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, the friction between the stone and the mountain demonstrates the wonder generated in this struggle to become, to grow, and to change.

PRAISE FOR THE AMATEUR SCIENTIST’S NOTEBOOK

“In The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, Jesse DeLong tracks the intricacy of sunflowers, families, fishing rivers and particles, Idaho farms, chemicals, miners, birds. With descriptions that feel like long unspooling field guides, he stitches into perception the smallest events of grasses and feathers, and the desire that forms and slackens between people. His poems are acts of attention that carry, often indistinguishably, great beauty and disillusion.”

“’Shall we step forward or fall back?’ The quest to stop time is a quest for poets, mathematicians, and magicians, and Jesse DeLong embodies all of these identities and more in The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook. Through their seamless unification of lyric, pastoral, and confessional traditions, the poems in this collection unwrap both the eternal and ephemeral nature of memory, family, and home.”

“Jesse DeLong’s The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook is full of a vibrant speech-sound benevolence, of the natural world as a steadying subject, and the sciences observed, discerned through description and keen dialectics. Phosporous of which DeLong speaks, can be likened to the features of these poems: elements existing in their own allotropic forms of color, light, and sensation providing us with a gentle, prudent, and whittled intensity. And verses between the you and I address the study of love relations and how they alight, illume this delicate flowering world: You are the bulb I was born to close my eyes to. These are gorgeous, urging and sentient poems.”

“Jesse Delong’s inkpot is his heart; and his blest West quill is the birdbone or the staunchstem; and the arc of each deepseen word comes tendered by seating quill in actual ticker. Not since I closed the eyes of my mind and inhaled Roethke’s greenhouse-pointillisms have I wrung my bell upon such epic green as this. Furthermore, the
true legends-in-the-making have a knack for filling every bitter longing with a beauty thicker than the thing lost. I’ve been a loud fan of Jesse Delong’s poems for a very long time. In the next 33 seconds, one page into The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, you will be too.”

“In The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, Jesse DeLong alchemizes, from the burnt remains of the past, a music of phosphorescent sorrow. Part lament, part experiment in the erudition of the senses, these are poems torn from skin towards the current / of song, wind, & root. I return to them. I learn from their beauty.”

“We leave this book as we leave a gallery after viewing a challenging, powerful exhibition: for a while we walk around with freshly-cleared eyes, marveling at the teeming details and shadings of light we rarely attend to. That is: for a few moments, we see the world fresh.” – South Florida Poetry Journal, Issue 20, Feb. 2021

Jesse in the News:

Book Details

Title: The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook

Author: Jesse DeLong

Publication Date: April 6, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-936097-36-4

$16.95

Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123

Available at your favorite local bookstore, on bookshop.org

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