Books like Song of the World Becoming — picked by fans

“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).”

I first heard these words from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman at a Berkeley Poets Cooperative workshop in 1972. I was intrigued and had to read Whitman’s work myself! Up until this point, my primary influences as a poet had been the Romantics (especially Keats, Shelley, and Byron), Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Whitman was a revelation. He showed me not only that a poet could write in an entirely different way, but also that an individual can encompass and represent vastness. When Whitman reveals his name in “Song of Myself,” he includes the whole universe in a single breath: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos.” 

Sylvia Plath created an important body of poetry although she committed suicide at age 30.

After hearing about her work in the 1970s, I looked for her books and read all of them before The Collected Poems came out in 1981. Her images were indeed amazing, and they made me look at the world more closely: “The pears fatten like little buddhas. / A blue mist is dragging the lake.”

Even more importantly, she wrote honestly about undesirable mental states like depression: “People or stars / Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.” I admired her willingness to share her sorrow, anger, and jealousy, turning negative moods into art, and I wanted to bring such candor into my own poetry.

Lisa Rosenberg’s background as a physicist and space program engineer informs poems that probe the beauties and mysteries of existence.

I first encountered her work in 2022 when she read in the Virtual STEM Poetry Series sponsored by Farmingdale State College in New York. Her poems are vivid, juxtaposing biology and cosmology: “The aster blooms. The supernova cools.” They are also rich in sound repetitions (“blooms,” “cools”) and musicality.

In Weeds and Stars, Rosenberg both invents new poetic forms and makes existing ones—like the sonnet, prose poem, villanelle, pantoum, and cento—her own. Her book came out in 2026 and is therefore a relative, not an ancestor, of my own poetry. In fact, Rosenberg’s poems and mine share some common ancestors, including Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath. 

In the title poem of Mega-Galaxies, Coleman compares galaxies weighing a billion times more than our sun to individual humans lined up side by side in their boxes in a Zoom meeting.

Think about that: we each contain the limitlessness of the universe! This reminds me of Walt Whitman, who called himself “a kosmos.” I first discovered Coleman’s poetry in 2019 when the anthology she edited, HERE: Poems for the Planet, was published, and I immediately recognized her as a kindred poet.

She is concerned with both understanding the universe and preserving the ecosystems of Earth—all the interrelated plants, animals, and microorganisms, both the humble and the magnificent.

Mega-Galaxies is a slender volume; I look forward to reading more of Coleman’s work.

I love this book because of the lively exchanges between the authors and because they do not shy away from asking the big questions. I like the way it combines a question-and-answer section, a dialogue, a debate, and original metaphors.

Focused on the odd coincidences in cosmology, such as the uniformity of the cosmic background radiation, the value of the cosmological constant, the horizon problem, and the strange predominance of matter over antimatter, the book takes the reader on a whirlwind tour through the mysteries of the cosmos.

I found the book easy to read because the authors approach the topic with humor and humility, two traits rarely found in a modern-day cosmologist. Lastly, I like this book because one of the authors, Luke Barnes, graciously appeared on my podcast, Conversations Beyond Science and Religion.

I gave this book to my eldest daughter when she was about 12, and many years later, she told me it absolutely blew her mind.

It is a young adult book that covers much the same ground as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with a history of Western philosophy and the questions it throws up woven into an engaging story of a young girl and her mysterious tutor. 

Towards the end, the narrative takes an unexpected postmodern turn, and it had me gripped as it raced to its conclusion. Brilliant.

The Door into Fire is the first book in the Tale of Five series by Diane Duane. Set in the Middle Kingdoms universe, it follows the adventures of a sorcerous swordsmith who is desperately trying to master the power of the blue Flame while protecting the person he loves from annihilation. The Door into Fire is saga of power, magic, and friendship readers of epic fantasies will love.

This book may well be the next best thing to spending an afternoon with Stephen Hawking.

After all, Belgian theoretical physicist Thomas Hertog has been one of Hawking’s closest collaborators in the years before the wheelchair-bound genius died in 2018. I liked how Hertog alternates difficult theoretical concepts with his personal accounts and experiences of working with an iconic figure like Hawking.

I especially love this book because it is about one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science: the true nature of time. In what Hertog calls "Hawking’s final theory," the laws of nature do not precede the Big Bang but co-evolve with the early universe itself.

I have to admit that parts of the book were really hard for me to understand, but I was flabbergasted by the suggestion that our observations may have a tangible influence on the evolution and the properties of the universe itself.

Tim Peake is a bit of a hero of mine. He’s a British astronaut who’s spent time on the International Space Station.

More than that, he’s a great communicator – especially with kids – and his boundless enthusiasm for the adventure of space exploration is infectious. Explaining what might otherwise be big, scary ideas (how are stars made? What is antimatter?) in a way that is clear and interesting to younger readers isn’t easy, but he manages it effortlessly.

I learned a lot from this book.

It Started with a Big Bang: The Origin of Earth, You and Everything Else is another picture book that covers the same territory for the very young as The Stuff of Stars. The writing is conversational and accessible. The illustrations are compelling. The two books read side by side would support and inform one another.