Joanna Solfrian

The Second Perfect Number Joanna Solfrian

The Second Perfect Number, a chapbook of twenty-eight poems (written one per day of a recent February), reads as a journal in couplet form. Solfrian, an award-winning poet who has authored two previous full-length collections, follows the mind of a woman as she goes through a month's worth of parenting, sex, menstruation, and even a death. The poems, loosely based on the ghazal form, explore how those demands intersect and fight each other for some sort of cohesion. It attempts this cohesion through acts of the intellect, while simultaneously criticizing that impulse for its failure in the face of commonplace divinity. The chapbook quests for some sort of "second perfection" not the original plan of controlling entropy with the intellect, but the second plan of succumbing to a more native, spiritual state of feeling.