Great Mineral Silence

Author: Emmalea Russo

Publisher: Sputnik & Fizzle (2020)

In Russo’s long poem, the speaker engages with George Oppen’s “great mineral silence”, tracing cosmic motions in ordinary life and locating the mineral silence in steel mills, deserts, digital spaces, on the moon, the body, and in relationships. Russo suggests this silence is a supra-human force that the word “love” can attempt to describe. The poem, both cellular and exobiological, seems to hum, as Russo writes, like the “sigh of a sun.”