In the poems of Redshift, images from science and mathematics dance with artifacts brought shadowed and glittering from memory. Engines and equations encounter forsythia and the green iridescence of locusts. These poems deeply attend to place and past. Wallace studies her memories in the metaphorical light of redshift—the increasing wavelength of visible light as a celestial object recedes—revealing in the smallest detail, infinity.
Designed by book artist Nancy Solomon, Redshift’s text papers echo the gritty, tactile imagery in Wallace’s poems, paired with a painting by Nancy Tokar Miller, which is at once deeply located and full of movement, playing with opacity and transparency. On the cover, cerulean stripes lick across bare handmade paper the color of Tucson sand.