Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms and Praise for Lois

A gift for his wife, Jay Wright's Polynomials and Pollen explores the complementary exigencies of abstraction and physicality. In five sections, each arranged under the aegis of a tutelary concept—from the Yoruba, Akan, Bamana, and Náhuatl—the book is a constellation of protophilosophical inquiry into notions of order, disarray, evidence, flowering, and return; it is also a dynamically visceral work whose feelingtones register rage as well as devotion.

Jay Wright—poet, essayist, playwright—was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1934. He has been the recipient of an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship, the Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award, and the 1996 Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Most recently, Wright was named the 2005 recipient of Yale University's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. He lives in Bradford, Vermont.