Keith Gottschalk is one of very few English language poets after Walt Whitman to compose poems celebrating engineers, inventions, and scientists. With wit and paradox, these poems explore our solar system, and celebrate astronomers and spaceflight.
This collection opens with an imaginary trip through time from Copernicus to Einstein — those who literally made space as we conceptualise it today. It closes with an imaginary trip through our solar system.
In between, we find moving elegies to astronauts who lost their lives, and celebrations of a glittering international constellation of engineers, inventors, mathematicians, and researchers. Irony, allusions, double-entendres, and wonderment are always looking over the reader's shoulder. Many of these poems, composed over thirty-four years, have already been individually published to acclaim in literary and other magazines.
