The Atom
by Sarah Mangold
Publisher: Wave Books
Sewn booklet in letterpress covers - 5 x 7.5 inches, limited to 500 copies only.
Hilma af Klint's The Atom Series (1917) contains twenty drawings which illustrate two images of an atom on each page: one image shows the atom as it exists on the etheric plane and the other shows the the atom's state of energy on the physical plane enlarged four times. The twenty atom poems consist of af Klint's original notation for each atom in italics, these were derived from af Klint's notebooks and published in Notes and Methods by the University of Chicago Press. Source words for the atoms were collected from Occult Chemistry, Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements by Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater (1908).
Shaped by extensive research around the life and work of Hilma af Klint, specifically The Atom Series (1917), Sarah Mangold's The Atom is as graceful and dynamic as its inspiration. These “poetry atoms” propel the reader into various states of reflection, not only calling attention to the physical act of reading, but also reminding us of the elemental reasons why one would use poetry as a framework for understanding ourselves in relation to the world.