Grief is a Question: How to Prove a Theory by Nicole Tong
“Given / the practice to call things gone, / how shall I speak of the line, / which neatly remains?” This question is at the heart of Nicole Tong’s haunting debut collection How to Prove a Theory. Through variations in line, Tong incants the dead, her elegiac poems long to give form to a grief which is never static, but always searching for theories. The line, though varying in length and type, remains as a kind of proof of existence. The line ultimately gives order to the ch
