the hubble cantos, by Tree Riesener, is brimming with astonishing imagery and thoughtful verse. If, as Joseph Campbell stated in his book Creative Mythology (and I paraphrase here), the role of poetry is to cause the floor to fall out from under the everyday and plunge us into the mythic, Riesener has accomplished this in spades. Not only does she take us on a tour of the cosmos in an ekphrastic series of poems based on images from the Hubble Telescope, she challenges our perspective of ourselves in our world and that cosmos. In the process of completing this daunting task, Campbell’s proverbial floor drops out from fantastic and beautiful images from the Hubble, to the infinite, the unknowable, and sensations beyond the capacity of humans to comprehend. In other words, by the end of this collection, she comes pretty damn close to describing the indescribable, and leaves us, at last, feeling as if we’ve not only witnessed, but have experienced, the majestic workings of our universe. Read more