J.M. Coetzee Reviews Poetry Anthology … in Math Journal

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“Just as there are poets who will wrestle for months to get an insight down on paper in its most jewel-like form, because to them the truth of the poem is inseparable from its expression, so there are mathematicians who believe that, if a given proof is lengthy and messy, then, no matter how ironclad its logic, there must be a better proof—briefer, more elegant—waiting to be uncovered.”

—J.M. Coetzee in a review of the anthology Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (pdf) that was recently published in, yes, the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. (via Literary Saloon)

Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA. More from this author →