From the Publisher:

A remarkable collection of luminous poems for cherishing cultures, languages, and the Earth — From poet and urbanist Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo.

“Listen with your natural body,” writes Shimshon-Santo. “In the beginning, there was song.” Random Experiments in Bioluminescence tracks a woman’s search for connection, language, and belonging. Her world is filled with life, languages, and freedom seeking. She pays homage to urban trees, walks along the Pacific Ocean holding the feather of a gull, and hears rain play marimba on forest leaves and branches. She experiments with form, scribbling faux-mathematical formulas to echolocate herself within the cosmos. Choral, cryptographic, and exhilarating, Shimshon-Santo provides glimpses into a poetics of livability.

The collection opens with a “genealogy of the moment,” where a cast of human characters is replaced by a sketch of interconnections: paw prints, gestures, sunlight. Her accomplices are letters and millipedes, sparrows and lemon trees, shadow and light—in “x or x prime clock time.” All life has agency. Trees and vines tangle their hair together to escape over brick walls. A piano decomposes into forest mulch. Seaweed fronds curl around pilings. Gravity “plants humans in the ground like oaks” while a black bird murmuration elevates skyward. The poet finally locates herself within the cosmos as a “rapture gawker of infinity consciousness.” 

Her verse has kinesthetic authority on the page, flowing from right to left, left to right, or woven top down into a conversation between four languages. Mother tongues share pages, side-by-side-by-side, in a line dance of translations by the author, her family, and friends. A “Villanelle for Yemanja” (Ifa deity and mother of the fishes) coexists with a piyyut inspired by the talmudic Akdamut. She morphs poems into flow charts, pictograms, haikus, and chants, all scattered between photographs. The outcome of her “random experiments” is a homecoming to the body and the planet; respect for womanhood, and awe for the multiplicity of life, languages, and habitats on planet Earth.

Keywords: poetry; nature poems; birds; insects; botany; California; trees; Pacific Ocean; natural world; nature; ecology; restoration; translation, language; mother tongue; piyyut; woman

Early Praise

"Shimshon-Santo’s humor bubbles through this collection, along with her wisdom—“Eekspay Achurnay?” she asks us in Pig Latin, bringing playfulness to the table, and indeed, she plays with form throughout, bringing in mathematical equations and cryptography and photography, leaving out vowels, sharing a dream in an exhilarating rush of ellipses. Words dance across the page. These pages bring us back to our most embodied, enmeshed selves, bring us back to the Earth and its abundant wonders."

- Gayle Brandeis

"Amy Shimshon-Santo is the most organic poet I have ever read. Her polylingualism extends beyond our species, feeding us meaning from panoramic angles. Language is simply the stuff she inhales and exhales. Like a spell in the stern, nurturing lap of Mother Earth."

- Mamle Wolo

"Amy Shimshon-Santo’s poetry is an exploration of the deeper connections between the selves and identities molded by languages, cultures, and the land(s) we inhabit. The poems weave the tragedies we experience daily with the beauty and wonderment of being alive. Among separation and closeness, desperation and hope, Shimshon-Santo offers us the gift of inhabiting these spaces in the present moment. She invites us to listen to and to thrive in the abundance that is all around us."

- Leonora Simonovis

“Amy Shimshon-Santo’s poems are the words of a survivor, a warrior, and a creator. Time and time again, across borders and languages, she takes us into sensuous and deeply emotional places, finding beauty and rootedness and meaning in everyday moments and extraordinary landscapes.”

- Héctor Tobar