Code by Charlotte Pence. Black Lawrence Press, 2020. 102 pp. $17.95 (paperback)

Charlotte Pence’s second poetry collection, Code, is an astonishing accomplishment. In its shuttling among the relations between art, science, and grief, Code weaves together strands of inquiry about the social implications of each, as well as the productive tensions and imbrications they share. Most impressive is the capaciousness of the collection, its ambits around aesthetic theory, processes of mourning, and the ethics of genetic technology. Pivoting between vast temporal and ontological scales, ranging from existential queries about the human as a species to those about the individual, Code sustains probing questions about our past and future, such as: what does it mean for our species to engineer and edit DNA? How does art tie us to the collective, including our Paleolithic ancestors? And how does the artist negotiate both the discontinuity and continuity of her experiences with others to take the first steps in creating art? How does grief entangle us with others, including those in the deep past? In playful, experimental and narrative lyrics, as well as lyric essays, Pence deftly weaves together meditations about evolution, art, grief, maternity, and technology, including CRISPR, a gene editing technology that can be used to treat and prevent the spread of genetic diseases.

At the heart of the collection are lyric investigations into a genomic poetics, which are inspired and structured by the gene’s “instructions” that inform the formation of specific proteins. The letters of the DNA code, A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine), and T (thymine), constitute the nucleotide bases of DNA and in Pence’s hands are such personas as a father (“T.”), a mother dying of an inherited disease (“A.”), as well as the mother’s own DNA. Her representations of DNA invite questions about the nature of grief as the handmaiden of human life and an imbroglio with which each individual must at some point contend. For Pence, our human vulnerability connects us to an infinite non-human world: “It’s our one power,” T. writes in a letter to his dying wife,

                                        creating another day
out of the darkness. Do you mind that I tell you what

the moon is doing each night? Waxing gibbous, first-quarter,
waxing crescent…I don’t know what else to say while I
clean the sheets under you, wipe the spittle from your cheek.
I can’t say: It will get better. So I describe the sky….

The tenderness of this poem, its pre-elegiac spirit, is steeped both in the mundane and cosmic, reminding us both of our finitude and our entanglement with other lives. DNA, as Pence recalls, is “[a] hope to continue,” the warp and weft of a human future, and yet her imagination goes deeper, her speaker speculating about “her voice”: “one long ‘O’ / as in: Oh. I was hoping to see you again.” Through the trope of the O, which is at once an invocation, an origin, and the appeal used before a name in a direct address, Pence casts DNA as the seat of craving and relation.

In another poem, “[t]he messenger who waits in the hall ready / to run and weave, to repeat and repeat and repeat,” DNA, in Pence’s formulation, is at once the material out of which hope and regeneration derive, a cautionary tale that warns against editing the germline, a source of resilience and self-protection, as well as a wellspring for mutation and difference. Both formally inflected and experimental poems constitute the collection, and Pence’s formal range is displayed in such poems as “DNA Knows Once You Say It, You Can’t Take It Back,” which enacts through the replication of the letters of the genomic sequence how CRISPR may be used to cure sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, and other genetic diseases. In the first section of the poem “Cystic Fibrosis,” readers are provided with a glimpse into the science of CRISPR, which in the context of this particular disease “deletes TTT on Exon 10: // ACTTCACTTCTAATGGT…” The DNA code continues until it reaches the supposed “TTT” protein and is replaces with the base “GGT.” Cast in the language of DNA, the poem reminds us that DNA is composed of a grammar and alphabet, but one that is unreadable to most except the geneticist. In the poem’s contiguity to narrative poems that are in conversation with the DNA sequence, Pence suggests that DNA’s human meaning is apparent only within the context of symbolic language. To extrapolate, science seems to call out for poetry—it needs to be lifted from the realm of pure information and to be in conversation with what supplies meaning to human life: grief, heartache, love, desire, and the frisson of everyday life, which in this case are Pence’s moving poems about the bonds among a father, a dying mother, and a child.

Her poems also probe the processes of inquiry that science and art might share, as well as the tensions between them. What can art’s privileging of imaginative play, its tensions between possibility and constraint, offer science? And what can science teach art? In one of a series of poems about Paleolithic cave art entitled “Touring Cueva de las Monedas I.,” Pence writes,

The map-less dark reminds of centuries
when people knew they did not possess
dominion over nature, and its predators
pathogens and meteors. Now we pretend otherwise. (8)

Pence warns against the consequences of human exceptionalism and domination, attitudes that have contributed to our current climate crisis. Like Emily Dickinson’s poem “Split the Lark,” Pence explores both the ways in which poetry and science mediate and balance each other, as well as the dangers of human wonder unchecked by respect for the alterity of the other. Grief, an appreciation for the mutual vulnerability of bodies, can be a source of restraint, much like art, according to Pence: “Grief, like art, continues to teach / the limits of the possible” (50). It’s important to note that her measured qualifications of human mastery, her embrace of a pragmatic skepticism, such as in “DNA Cautions About Editing the Germline” strike a note of caution, setting off the poems that explore the powers of CRISPR.

A highly intertextual collection, Code is dedicated to Pence’s friend Shira Shaiman, whose own poems are threaded into the book. As a tribute to the late Shaiman, Code surveys the jagged landscape of grief, asking where it leads: “I fear what tugs at the edges of what I’m writing: that resolution does not exist. I also fear the double-edged comfort time gives: an erosion. A distance from the moments the living once shared with the dead” (17). She turns to an excerpt from Shaiman’s manuscript The Last House for answers: “Ultimately, active grieving is a potent catalyst for burning through to new layers of insight and knowledge, a new orientation of the self to the world.” Shaiman’s poems, many of which explore the untimely death of her own mother’s passing, as well as her own worries about contracting her mother’s illness, establish the tenor of grief and its concomitant existential queries as the base notes of the collection. Maternity is also a charged subject in the collection, especially in the context of future precarity, specifically in Shaiman’s poems that wrestle with illness and Pence’s depictions of “A.’s” risk of passing her genetic disease down to her child. In her poem “A., the New Mother, Wants More Instructions,” she imagines maternity as not-only-human— a feral, ancient landscape:

Motherhood is obedience. The desire came
from some tangled place. A field folded over itself littered
by old glaciers’ lost pocket change of root and rock,
silt and salt. A field that burns clover and fescue
with the rabid hope of creating something new. (25)

The intersubjective spaces of the manuscript, such as where Pence enters into a conversation with Shaiman, introduce not just polyvocality into the manuscript, but an ethos akin to call and response. With generosity and imagination, Code abounds with thematic and formal investigations into the shared “codes” between us, including the genetic, semantic, ethical and aesthetic. At once playful and sobering, Code explores the psychic and biological grammar of love, grief, and other forms of entanglement. “What is // air,” she asks, “but shared possibility?,” a question perhaps never so urgent as it is now.