Clark Coolidge, in reference to his own poems, writes, “We are accustomed to regard words in only one way—as vehicle. My experiments invite you to regard words as an object—or more exactly, as an organism, with patterns of existing that are specific to itself, inexplicable and marvelous.”

More Radiant Signal, by Juliana Leslie, is a book of poems with patterns of existing, both inexplicable and marvelous. Like Coolidge, Leslie regards words as an object, as an organism, as structural units apart from their typical semantics. And in this way, Leslie builds, poem by poem, an alternative poetic literacy—idiosyncratic and highly self-aware—that prioritizes the tangible.

These poems exist in a category somewhere between mathematical proofs and textual sculpture. Either way, every page offers a unique composition: things to be figured, felt, weighed, measured, but never interpreted. (Interpretation is too removed, requires too many middlemen.) “You are the textual orange / between presence and absence” Leslie writes, interpolating radical sensation into a pair of familiar abstractions. Yet it’s the four preceding lines—of the poem “Unknown Quantity”—that mark the true engagement of this work: “How many ways to exist? / I don’t have a pencil / as if I could write this / I can’t even think.”