From the Publisher:

Random Experiments in Bioluminescence is 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.” This collection tracks a woman’s search for language and belonging. Choral, cryptographic, and exhilarating, Shimshon-Santo provides glimpses into a poetics of  planetary livability.

The collection opens with a “genealogy of the moment” in “x or x prime clock time.” 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 black birds murmurate skyward. Echolocate in the galaxy through poems, and become a “rapture gawker of infinity consciousness.”

Mother tongues join a line dance of translations with family and friends. A trilingual villanelle for òrìṣà cohabitates with talmudic inspired piyyut. Poems morph into flow charts, pictograms, haikus, and chants — scattered between photographs of habitats.

Her verse has kinesthetic momentum on the page—flowing from right to left or left to right, ascending or descending, to weave conversations between languages. The outcome of Random Experiments in Bioluminescence is a homecoming to the body and the planet; respect for multiple languages and awe for life in our pluriverse.

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