• Book Title
  • Diary of A Cell
  • A full length collection of poems, was published as the winner of the 2004 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, judged by Charles Harper Webb.
  • PUBLISHER
  • Steel Toe Books
  • Year
  • 2005

From the back cover:

"In Diary of a Cell, Jennifer Gresham lays a sharply focused lens of language on the surface of experience to learn, as she says in "Anatomy," 'the secrets of the deep.' The depths here are not measured in fathoms or leagues but by the complicated and complex scale of human emotions. Gresham is a clear-headed and clear-eyed poet who understands "why the memory of kindness/ can find us in the dark" and her debut volume radiates with the light of this discovery."

Love in Nerdville

He was as entranced with the perfect helix
of her hair as he was with the tectonics
of her breast. He adored how she flushed
each time he said parasympathetic.

She was the lemon, he the copper wire.

The days he circled in lonely orbits
around girls as beautiful and terrible
as black holes now seemed like a dream,
one he could dissect with pushpin
labels: the heart of ridicule, empty stomach
of Friday nights, the squiggly entrails
of disappointment. Something learned
and now stored away, allowing him to transcend
the normal laws of high school, to distill
something pure.

  • Book Title
  • Explaining Relativity to the Cat
  • A chapbook of science poems.
  • PUBLISHER
  • Pudding House Press
  • Year
  • 2004

A short collection of science themed poems. As reviewer Cheryl Snell states:

"Many of the lyrical narratives grapple with big questions, and we gain entry into the poems from many angles: "Model of an Atom" compares Schrodinger's creative work to obsessive love; in "To End All Wars," we meet Oppenheimer, "...eyes full of ash, the rising/sun eclipsed. How hollow/are the refrains of discovery/when one has become death, destroyer of worlds." With her command of poetic device, imagery and sound in particular, Gresham goes beyond the surface of the poems, adding layers of meaning. The title piece recalls Einstein's dream, and wears its erudition lightly. It opens up new insights with charm and accessibility; it wants to be read aloud."

Explaining Relativity to the Cat

Imagine, if you will, three mice.
Contrary to what you have
heard, they are not blind
but are in a spaceship
traveling near the speed of light.
This makes them unavailable
for your supper, yes.

So these mice, traveling near
the speed of light, appear
quite fat, though there is
no cheese aboard. This is
simply a distortion of mass,
because the mass of a mouse
is nothing more than a bundle
of light, and vice versa. I see
how this might imply mice
are in the light fixtures,
undoubtedly a problem, so

let me try again.
If two people attempted
to feed you simultaneously,
no doubt a good situation,
but you were on a train
traveling near the speed
of light, the food would
appear unappetizing, falling
to the plate in slow motion,
an extended glob of protein
that never smelled good,
if you ask me, train or no.
The affinity of the food
for the plate, what we call
gravity, is really just
a stretch in the fabric
of a space-time continuum,
what happens when you
have sat in a seat too long,
perhaps on this very train.

Oh kitty, I know how you hate
to travel and the journey must
have made you tired. Come now,
lick your coat one more time
and let us make haste
from this strange city
of light and fantastic dream.