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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jesse DeLong teaches Composition and Literature at Louisiana State University, but he grew up in Northern Idaho and Western Montana. He holds a B.A.in English from the University of Montana and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Alabama. His poems have appeared in the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner as well as the journals Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and Typo. With book artist Sonja G. Rossow, he has published several artist’s books and chapbooks, including Tearings and Other Poems, and Earthwards, both through Curley Head Press. Other than traditional academic settings, he has taught Literature at Donaldson Correctional Facility and has worked as a Case Manager at a Reentry Services Center, teaching hard-and-soft-skill courses, such as Anger Management and Parenting, to parolees and probationers.

PRAISE FOR THE AMATEUR SCIENTIST’S NOTEBOOK