How to Prove a Theory
In this brave, elegiac debut, How to Prove a Theory, Nicole Tong relies on empirical evidence to construct meaning in the wake of a series of losses that include a childhood lost to trauma, a best friend lost following childbirth, a brother-in-law, a father, and a generation of children in the poet’s hometown after a water contamination event. In the face of loss, the poet describes grief as embodied: “I know / neither how to hold you up nor where / to safely place you down.” Revelation’s uncanny comfort comes as the “process called trust / keeps happening.”
Readers will observe Tong’s lyrical kinship with poetic predecessors Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore as she seeks to name and explain the inexplicable. Along the way, Tong turns to the visual art of Doris Salcedo, Alice Neel, Monica Cook, Joseph Cornell, and others to articulate absence through post-apocalyptic landscapes, lyrical hypotheses, and mysterious persona poems that make music more than they mourn: “You are everything / if not each moment before. O / transitivity. O verb waiting to be.” Trust this poet and her collection to honor the lost and celebrate the living.
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Meet the Author
Nicole Tong
Nicole Tong is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Fairfax County, Virginia. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sundress Academy at Firefly Farms, George Mason University where she received her MFA. In 2016, she served as a Writer-in-Residence at Pope-Leighey House, a Frank Lloyd Wright property in Alexandria, Virginia. She is a recipient of the President’s Sabbatical from Northern Virginia Community College where she is a Professor of English. Her writing has appeared in American Book Review, CALYX, Cortland Review, and Yalobusha Review among others. She is also the winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, awarded to her debut collection, How to Prove a Theory, announced by Washington Writers’ Publishing House in 2017.