In Russo’s long poem, the speaker engages with George Oppen’s “great mineral silence”, tracing cosmic motions in ordinary life and locating the mineral silence in steel mills, deserts, digital spaces, on the moon, the body, and in relationships. Russo suggests this silence is a supra-human force that the word “love” can attempt to describe. The poem, both cellular and exobiological, seems to hum, as Russo writes, like the “sigh of a sun.”

Emmalea Russo is an artist, writer, and astrologer. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on intersections of poetry, media, and cosmology. Her books are G (2018) and Wave Archive (2019). Her essays, reviews, and poetry have appeared in Artforum, American Chordata, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Bust, Cosmopolitan, Granta, Gulf Coast, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, SF MOMA’s Open Space, and elsewhere. She lives at the Jersey shore. More here.