Poet Amy Newman says that Jessica Reed “explores with lyric beauty and patient observation the seemingly counterintuitive relationship between solidity and probability.” Poet and essayist Marianne Boruch characterizes this collection as “a celebration of the visible and invisible,” and writes that Reed has a “compelling, near x-ray vision.” And poet Bin Ramke, who declares that Reed’s voice “causes new energies to arise in language,” describes World, Composed as “a new but already necessary book.”

World, Composed takes exquisite aim at the universe of physics in a voice of scientific testimony and poetic innovation. The poet speaks across time and space in conversation with the ancient Lucretius, who first wrote of atomic theory in verse two thousand years ago. From ether to entropy, from the mind of god to the doubts of mathematicians, from relativity to a comet’s debris in the night skies over an Indiana farm, Jessica Reed questions the idea that the world is composed only of atoms and void, exploring the elusive nature of matter and the myriad textures the void takes in the human imagination.  

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