It might just be me, but the mix of cosmic themes and some of the writing style in this collection didn’t really click for me. I found it hard to connect, and some of the deeper meanings slipped past me. That said, I usually enjoy poetry—whether it’s classic or contemporary—and I’m a big fan of Nikita Gill’s work. So while this one wasn’t quite my cup of tea, it could definitely resonate with those who appreciate more cosmic or abstract poetry.

#TheHeartbeatoftheUniverse #NetGalley

My love for anthologies did not decay when I read this book. Wonderful in every way, as astronomy is also one of my passions.

A lovely poem collection revolving around science and science fiction concepts; I found it to be a touching reminder that science and art are neither polar opposites nor mutually exclusive. A few of the poems do require some googling for additional context, but the trouble is SO worth it. (Realizing that FIELD NOTES by Lola Haskins was a critique of a racist scientist and his coauthor blew me away. Wow.)

Publishing date: 01.04.2024
Thank you to Netgalley and Interstellar Flight Press. My opinions are my own.

The book as a meal: Science textbooks, a muesli bar, and some coffee
The book left me: Feeling like a nerd (affectionate)

Negatives:
Some poems might require you to know some physics, math's, or science to properly understand
Some repetitive titles

Positives:
The chapters had great cohesion with every poem
Themes range from completely scientific to the mundane of everyday life

Features:
An overall theme of love and existence, science and creativity merged, split up in 5 different sections with different themes, scientific facts galore

Why did I choose this one?
I have a confession to make ... I am a nerd. A science nerd ... and a poetry nerd. So, this hit home almost immediately. I love a collection that merges themes like this. Absolutely beautiful cover too.

Pick-up-able? Put-down-able?
Devourable. I was gobbling up poem after poem, rolling in nerdy facts and lines in absolute delight. Some of the poems were really short, others a little bit longer. It is a very quick read if you sit with it, but I think I would recommend a slower approach and let it sink properly in.

What was the vibe and mood?
It almost feels like watching a scientist and an artist make out and proclaim their love to each other. This is such a visual and transcending collection, but the central theme is clear: Love across time and space. Or maybe that isn't the theme at all, but it resonated that way with me.
This is speculative fiction, so it might translate differently for you.

Final ranking and star rating?
5 stars, S tier. I think this is one of those books that have an overall low appeal to the general audience, but high appeal for a few specific people. The target audience will gobble it up (I am the target audience, I gobbled it up). A beautiful collection that does what it sets out to do wonderfully. I will be buying a trophy copy to keep on my coffee table, and I will be yapping about this book to my friends and audience.

Fascinating and unusual, an intereting anthology that open new doors on the universe
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This collection is both deeply comforting and somewhat unnerving, taking the reader on a journey through the universe we know from perspectives we may not. It's raw, real, and beautifully scientific, a sentiment that sounds like an oxymoron but works well for this body of work. Hockaday did an excellent job curating a selection of highly-emotive and moving works from a range of talented poets.

First of all, what a gorgeous title! It is both eye-catching and very appropriate for an anthology of modern speculative poems about the universe.

Because what is poetry but the heartbeat of reality?

The book is edited by Emily Hockaday and is made up of 5 general chapters. There was a cohesiveness to the parts and ordering of the poems, but nothing too distinct. This is a great book to have on your nightstand so that you can flip open a random poem and ponder over your existence in this vast universe.

As with almost all anthologies, there were some poems that stood out for me more than others.

My favorite poems were:
Mostly Hydrogen by Jack Martin
Postulate 2 by Timons Esaias
Sparking the Matter by Tod McCoy
Almost Certainly a Time Traveler by Jarod K. Anderson
At the Natural History Museum by Bruce Boston
All the Weight by Holly Day
Leaving by Bruce McAllister
Quantum Entanglement by Fred D. White
Music Remembers by Ashok K. Banker
The impending apocalypse helps me maintain perspective by Steven Dondlinger
Terra Incognita by Fred D. White
Continuum by G.O. Clark
Your Homeworls is Gone by Leslie J. Anderson

I am not a massive poetry fan, but I have read the odd speculative fiction poetry. Emphasis on odd. Still, I have a reading buddy who loves specfic poetry and I got the Netgalley of this book.

Here is the first poem of this collection as a teaser:

MOSTLY HYDROGEN
Jack Martin

Somewhere between Earth’s axis
and the hippocampus, a line draws
swimmers into water. This is
outer space, blue cloth over borders
with music notes in black enameled writing.
This is how memory works. This is how:
a large system of stars, gas, dust,
and dark matter orbits a common center.
Deep in the ice, bodies get stuck
reaching for the anterograde.
Each meadowlark song is a series
of green sparks. Oh, vastness,
I’ve forgotten how to be where I am.

Some of the poems were a complete mystery for me, as I lacked historical context or knowledge of the underlying physics. I struggled to relate. And that was true for the majority of poems in this collection. I assume that it‘s probably me and not the poems.

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher or author through NetGalley. All opinions are my own and I was not required to give a positive review.

This a collection of poems about science. As a science and art lover, I enjoyed the juxtaposition of these through these poems. Some of the poems would sound more meaningful to those who are familiar with the concepts/people mentioned in the poems. I would have like to read more poems on more topics. Glad to have been introduced to Ashok Banker’s work.

[Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this anthology, in exchange for an honest review.]

This generously sized anthology collects poems from ten years (2012-2022) of Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact, as selected by Senior Managing Editor Emily Hockaday. As Hockaday also possesses an MFA in poetry (from NYU), one might expect the selections to be a bit different than the standard run -- if there is such a thing! -- of speculative poetry.

One would not be wrong. To begin with, there are both heavy-hitting SF names -- Jane Yolen and Joe Haldeman among others -- and notable speculative poets like Bruce Boston, Robert Frazier, G.O. Clark, Jessy Randall, Mary Soon Lee, and Jennifer Crow. The poems themselves are organized in five sections ranging from completely science-based themes to hard SF, time travel, space travel, and the complex intersections of human nature and future existence. Overall quality is consistently high, though the science poems in particular may be a little opaque for some (or most) readers. Folks, that's what Wikipedia is for. I resorted to it several times during my reading, and was always rewarded with a deeper understanding of the poem in question.

The multi-layered nature of most of these poems -- even the staunchest hard science ones -- is every bit as evident as it is in modern mainstream verse. And, like modern mainstream anthologies, the lover of formal verse will find very little of it here. This was one of my few complaints about this anthology, however, and primarily a matter of personal taste.

Overall, this anthology is a valuable addition to the libraries of both SF readers and poetry lovers, whether they happen to be both or not. Unless one regularly reads Asimov's or Analog, most of the work here is likely to be unfamiliar. Highly recommended.

I felt that this collection of poetry was very profound and contained many metaphors that readers can connect with. The different fields of science that were mentioned, such as astrology, archaeology, and chemistry, were quite effective in their way of connecting science to emotion. My main complaints would be the repetition of titles regarding the subject of time travel, as well as certain poems that I felt were less strong than others. Along with this, there were frequent themes about love, which came off as sort of random in some of the pieces. Overall, I enjoyed the feelings that were invoked while reading through these pieces, and it is definitely worth the read for those who love outer space and greater thoughts on the universe.

A decent collection of poems. As is typical with anthologies, I liked some poems over others but the overall experience was a nice one. I enjoyed the speculative theme of the collection and can see myself dipping in and out of it in the future. Not my favourite read but still a worth while one.

I love speculative poetry but it’s a hard sell to both SFF fans and poetry fans. This collection will probably end up being my new go-to recommendation for introducing people to the genre. I normally think the organization of poetry anthologies is quite arbitrary but here they’re very thoughtfully categorized and pair nicely with one another so the shifts in tone and topic are smooth. I would pay for my own copy of this, there’s no higher compliment for an ARC than that! One complaint: the cover is bad. It’s dark and muddy and altogether just too generic.

This set of poets were mediocre at best, I was sucked into the collection with what I thought was going to carry all the way through the collection which in fact it did not. I am going to try to be as positive as possible during this review however, I feel as if one poem in this collection could be seen as offensive to a female as it came off a bit sexist. I struggled to keep reading the collection at one time because I felt like I could not visualize what the poets were trying to portray to us as a reader. Thank you to the publisher for allowing me the chance to read this.

I don't read much speculative poetry, but I may have to start. Just as with most anthologies, there were poems here that I loved, others I was indifferent to, and others I didn't understand at all! And yet...it was fascinating to read such a variety of poems with the thrum of science and science fiction running through them. Just a few favorites are "After National Geographic,"Archaeologists Uncover Bones, Bifocals, a Tricycle," "What a Time Traveler Needs Most," and "Time Traveler at the Grocery Store Circa 1992." Most of the ones I love most have a bit of a haunting, ominous feel to them. And they all come back to human-ness, to emotions, resonating in the end.

Review copy provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a collection of speculative fiction poems that I had high hopes for Like many anthologies I felt that some poems exceeded my expectations and some feel flat. The Heartbeat of the Universe offers a diverse range of poetic approaches and perspectives on themes ranging from hard science through mundane moments of life to reflections on broader societal structures.

I thought the way the book was organised worked well but might make some readers put the book down thinking it isn't the genre for them. So for all hard sci-fi or traditional spec fic writers I would urge you to stick with it past 80 pages. Why? Because the book is divided into thematic sections. The first half focuses more on abstract science-related themes which I struggled to get into but the latter half delves deeply into more traditional science fiction that critiques life and society. If you like Christie Nogles work then you’ll love the second half of this book.

Like many others I found the poem about a taxi ride after a flood to be particularly breathtaking!

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Thankyou Netgalley for the advanced reader copy of this book.

The Heartbeat of the Universe by Emily Hockaday, 110 pages. POETRY. Interstellar Flight Press, 2024. $10.
Language: PG (1 swear, 0 “f”); Mature Content: PG; Violence: PG
BUYING ADVISORY: HS - OPTIONAL
AUDIENCE APPEAL: LOW
Hockaday believes that poetry is not limited by reality or literalness, and the poems in this collection illustrate her belief. With facts and emotions meeting over topics of identity, love, discrimination, hope, family, time, and more, there is a poem for everyone.
I loved the meeting point between science and creativity that these poets embrace, though overall only a couple of the poems spoke to me. The concept was enjoyable. The mature content rating is for mentions of alcohol and sexual harassment. The violence rating is for mentions of assault.
Reviewer: Carolina Herdegen

This collection brings together the poetry published in Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact 2012–2022. I wanted to love this, I really did, and while some of the poetry is excellent, there is a lot of hackneyed stuff too, some of which I would have thought to be from a much earlier period, when SFF poetry was often really not good. Despite this, I recommend this to anyone with an interest in speculative poetry, to see what's been done and what's more recent in terms of themes, ideas, and approaches.

The Heartbeat of the universe is a collection of poems by different authors From the genre of science fiction and expeculative poetry.

To this day, I thought I didn't like poetry, but I discovered that what I don't like is romantic poetry and until I read this anthology I thought that was the only kind of poetry that existed.

There's no way I can leave a review of each of the poems, it would be too long 😅
But, if you're a fan of science fiction or expeculative fiction, this anthology might be of interest to you.

Some of my favorite are:
Leaving by Bruce Mc Allister
Hypothesis/Assertion by Daniel D. Villani
Taxi Ride by Ian Goh
Past Pluto by Eric Pinder

I enjoyed reading it, it was something out of my comfort zone and I'm glad I gave it the opportunity.

A beautiful collection of poems to transport you across the universe in a thought-provoking journey. I've always loved space and science fictions, but haven't dabbled in much poetry reading. This book was a great bridge between them and there's something for everyone. Some poems were weird, some were emotional, and some were even educational. I enjoyed the journey with this book, thank Netgalley & the publisher for the ARC ebook. I would read more from this collection in the future.