Trace Elements

Barbara Jordan, whose first book Channel won the 1989 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, writes poetry that is richly textured, simultaneously rigorous and elegant. Her work explores scientific and imaginative models of the universe and our place in it. This, her second collection, examines residues of meaning and mystery - in history, nature, belief systems - from a place of abandonment or skepticism. What can we know? How do we order knowledge? What are twentieth-century versions of the Fall? Jordan investigates trace elements, like clues that might be followed back to some overarching source.