Amateur Scientist's Notebook

Jesse DeLong’s full-length debut, The Amateur Scientist's Notebook, is a collection of poems set among the mines and farmlands of Idaho. The severe landscapes move the speaker to investigate his romantic and familial relationships through lyric considerations of the natural world and scientific concepts. Like the seeds on the face of a sunflower, each poem is both whole and a piece of a whole. Mimicking this structure, or the “struggle of scale,” these poems combine love and science, and the product is both declaration and interruption, elusive and graspable, love and the deconstruction of love. In The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, the friction between the stone and the mountain demonstrates the wonder generated in this struggle to become, to grow, and to change.

In The Amateur Scientist's Notebook, the full-length debut from Jesse DeLong, the beauty and processes of the natural world are distilled in the cycles and seasons of human love. DeLong poignantly observes the paradoxes and parallels between seed and bird; water and stem; history and humanity. With sharp lyricism and formal ingenuity that interrupts and intertwines, DeLong creates an experience of the world, a story of life. Fragmented yet familiar these poems become "acts of attention that carry, often indistinguishably, great beauty and disillusion."The Amateur Scientist's Notebook does the hard work of affirming humanity as a part of the natural world in all of its volatility and symmetry, speaking for both the segment and the singular, the continuous, and the instantaneous. The Amateur Scientist's Notebook marks Jesse DeLong as a major emerging talent in American poetics.