Overview

"Britt Kaufmann set out to take calculus for the first time at age 47 so she could cross it off her bucket list. She did not expect it to lead to her first full-length collection of poetry: Midlife Calculus. Calculus is the study of how things change, so it's a fitting title for poems about midlife, about learning something difficult and new, and the state of public education post pandemic. These poems, often short, bear witness to the struggles of both teachers and students. And, like any woman's romp through perimenopause, the mood and tone vary wildly, but always with a call to reflect and find moments of peace and purpose, to ""work literal equations / and maybe wonders, / figure the balance between expectations / and grace."""

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9781950413829

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Reviews

Midlife Calculus is a delight! Kaufmann plays with and infuses mathematical ideas into her poems in ways that are by turns clever, thought-provoking, sobering, and humorous. She rotates a familiar scene on its axis just slightly so that the everyday becomes profound. -Deirdre Longacher Smeltzer, PhD in Mathematics and co-author of Methods for Euclidean Geometry If you were to graph Britt Kaufmann's Midlife Calculus, you'd get a sine curve going convex and concave from comfort to danger and back again, approaching infinity. A thought-provoking poetry collection. Britt could teach My Dear Aunt Sally the order of operations for writing lyrically about math. -Jessy Randall, author of Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science Poetry's work of aiding our survival has never been more essential than it is now. Britt Kaufmann's Midlife Calculus performs this function in startling and refreshing ways, using the language of mathematics to investigate subjects such as the pandemic, the U.S.'s failing educational system, and school shootings while refusing despair, showing readers that the search for a sense of peace is not in vain. -Daniel Shank Cruz, author of Queering Mennonite Literature and Ethics for Apocalyptic Times

Author Information

Britt Kaufman lives and writes in the Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina. During the school year, she works as an in-class high school math tutor. Midlife Calculus is her first full-length collection of poetry which loosely chronicles the year she took calculus for the first time, at age 47, so she could cross it off her bucket list. Her previous chapbook, belonging, was published by Finishing Line Press (2011). Her poems have appeared in Scientific American, Kakalak, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Redheaded Stepchild, Pinesong, and Soft Star Magazine among others.

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