Astronomy Lessons

Praise for Astronomy Lessons

Ever dreamed of becoming a constellation? It may not be what you imagine. In this collection, Constance Brewer takes on multiple personas, modern and mythological, all attempting to wrestle with “things (they) don’t understand—”cosmology, evolution, personal relationships” through metaphors and motifs of astronomy. Using cosmic imagery and lyrical storytelling these poems take us through the trajectory of growing up, growing older, finding and losing love, and looking for it again, all against the backdrop of a cosmos that is comparatively vast and yet familiar. Though this collection seeks for wisdom, it often leaves us with the mystery of unanswerable questions, like “what should we think about before we drink from the river Lethe” and “what is love but a failed picture of the moon?”

—Tresha Faye Haefner, author of When the Moon Had Antlers (Pine Row Press, 2023, Finalist for the Glass Lyre Poetry Prize) and Founder of The Poetry Salon

Constance Brewer’s Astronomy Lessons scatters poems across the night sky of an emotional landscape we all know: love. Whether love’s objects are lovers, parents, children, or earth itself, these poems orbit around that which pulls us to reach farther, hold tighter, look deeper. The physics of love are everywhere. Brewer writes, It’s the passage of filament from one person / to another where theory goes astray….leaving us unable to explain the one thing / that would help us explain everything. Yet these poems somehow contain everything we might feel as we gaze upward, when we’re waiting / for science, having long given up on gods. That’s when we understand we are all made of star dust.

—Kathleen Cassen Mickelson, co-founding editor of Gyroscope Review and co-author of Prayer Gardening.

On writing Astronomy Lessons

Myth and science both seek to explain the world. Myth is not failed science; it is the engine that drives the What If of a curious mind. What haunts the intersection of science and mythology? That’s what we’d love to discover. Just because the stars are impossibly far away doesn’t mean they don’t have stories to tell. Astronomy Lessons looks to the stars to help explain what it means to be human. We create meaning out of the night sky—part truth, part fiction, and common to us all. Poetry is a search for our own creation myth, and the ritual of examining the night sky is the path to discovering the mythic being inside us all. —Constance Brewer

Sample Poem

Last Thoughts Before Drinking From The River Lethe

All day long you think of the underworld—
the gloom, the depth, the stink of sulfur.

It's the dimness that bothers you, the lack
of a view of the heavens. Instead of oceans of fish

there are rivers of souls, undulating in unison,
a great whale of movement that lulls you

into complacency. You think how it would be
trapped beneath the surface, slick with the vapors

of the final exhalations, air rift with final words
caught unspoken. Of the hundreds of billions

of souls you concentrate on a mere handful,
those that glow with extra light, as if incredibly

close in the night sky. The ones like summer fireflies.
You know as soon as you step in the flowing river 

of oblivion you’ll cease to care about the universe,
the sun, and the home you left behind. You promise 

yourself you won't forget what it's like—to choose
radiance as your form of conclusion.  

For more poems, click Excerpt.

More poems and books are always in the works—thank you for reading.

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