How to Navigate Our Universe is a collection of speculative poetry by Mary Soon Lee which plays with the notion that planets might have personalities, moons might have jealousies, and the universe itself might be understood by examining its neighborhoods. All of its poems seek to bring the vast unknowability of the universe down to size by anthropomorphizing, describing, and categorizing it in ways that humans might be able to comprehend.
The collection is divided into five sections that gradually work their way outwards from the home of earth, then the solar system, and moving toward the outer reaches of the universe. The first four sections comprise “how to” poems that instruct the reader about unlikely topics, such as “How to Infect Mars,” “How to Be a Star,” “How to Scale the Cosmos.”
The first poem of the collection, “How to Paint Mercury,” introduces a theme of anthropomorphism that’s threaded throughout these poems. In this one, Mercury is a kind of performer, and the painter is instructed to “Permit him to pirouette, / spinning as you paint,” while the reader imagines the dancing planet enjoying his time on the stage. He has had a traumatic past, we learn, and the poet recommends not erasing this trauma but instead recognizing the ways in which trauma contributes to Mercury’s personality and art: “Do not erase his scars, / the craters of a survivor.” He’s an injured planet that nonetheless is close to the sun, and the poet tells us to reassure him on that point: “Tell him he’s closest / to the Sun’s heart.”
In “How to Typecast Venus,” we hear about that planet’s personality while at the same time being warned not to typecast or dismiss her, based on everyone’s presumed “common knowledge” about her: “ … everyone who’s anyone / knows she’s a desolate acidic dystopia.” She’ll surprise us, the poem suggests, and we would do best not to base our opinions about her on easy, yet false, assumptions.
Colonization, with its simultaneous violence and homemaking, is another theme of the collection. “How to Infect Mars,” for instance, explores the inevitability of bringing along infection—literally pieces of one’s home—when stepping onto another planet, since all landers, we hear, are “ … sprinkled with spores / despite sterilization attempts.” The poem recognizes how such contamination will always occur, despite explorers’ best efforts, and it doesn’t provide any simple answers.
This fraught process of making a home elsewhere by bringing what we carry from our original place appears in numerous poems. “How to Circumnavigate Mars,” for example, uses images of early sailors and adventurers—barges and towpaths and horses—to describe the process of exploring Mars—a planet that, in the end, and almost inevitably, becomes a new home for humanity: “End where you began. Home.” We always bring our old homeways with us when we explore new territories, and consequently this collection is fascinated by what we bring with us on these travels. We can’t understand the universe, it suggests, without bringing along our prior understandings of people, personalities, and cultures—and applying them to new, otherwise unfathomable, spaces.
As the poems move out from the solar system into the broader universe, they explore entities beyond our home planets, and yet they continue to examine what it means to bring a human understanding to the otherwise unknowable. In “How to Stop Being a Star,” for instance, events like fusion are described in human terms as a way to begin to comprehend the science and empathize with presumably inanimate objects: “Fuel spent, calmly cease fusion, / relinquishing stellar status.” There’s ultimately human advice in this poem, as well, about setting aside the past and moving forward with one’s now nonstellar “life”: “When you have set aside the past, / dim to the shade of the backdrop.”
Lessons keep coming. In “How to Overlook Differences” in the collection’s third section, there’s a case made for compassion. After all, we’re all hurtling through space at the same rate and in essentially the same position, whether we’re human or nonhuman, alive or inanimate: all of us, the poem says, are “headed in pretty much / the same direction.”
By the time we get to this third section, we’re as far out into the universe as we can go, and yet we still bring with us our human concepts, terms, and frailties—the only tools we have with which to understand the universe and ourselves. Here we get to the broadest, deepest questions, and the poems reflect our need to make sense of these in whatever ways we can. In “How to Alphabetize the Universe,” for instance, the reader becomes a kind of librarian trying to categorize and organize the immensity of the universe, moving from A—for Aberration—to Z—for “zeroing in on the Zen of the zodiac.”
In the collection’s eponymous poem, “How to Navigate Our Universe,” we get tips for finding our way in this broad expanse of universe, with this little bit of advice to rely on gravity as a guide: “Hold hard the helm and for your guide take the tug of gravity’s tide.” Gravity is one thing we can rely on, here and in those far reaches, and that physical force becomes something we can use to find our way in traveling and exploring. It’s one of those things—unlike human culture, which is a tool presented in many of the other poems—that is present both here and there, both on earth and in the landscape far beyond our home planet.
The phrases used in “How to End the Universe” to name the end of time, on the other hand—the “Big Crunch,” the “Big Rip,” and the “Big Freeze”—play on the very earth-bound kind of marketing slogans used by astronomers to describe the activities of the universe in terms that are understandable to everyday humans. There is humor in these poems, too.
The collection’s fourth section, called “Pioneers,” explores the people that have been on the frontiers of science, astronomy, and space exploration—honoring them by exploring their contributions, personalities, and perspectives. The poem “How to Invent the Calendar,” for instance, looks at early technologies for understanding space and time—even before Babylon and Stonehenge—and focuses on the primeval calculators of “cave or bone.”
Another poem in this section, “How to Look Far,” honors Galileo Galilei’s work with telescopes to “look far” into the universe, praising his focus on illumination, light, and truth, and calling on the reader to live a life inspired by his dedication to seeing: “No matter what Ignorance insists, / banish lies. Let there be light.” Looking far, in this case, means literally looking far back in time, far across distances, and also far into the future, and this poem praises Galileo’s foresight to want to look as far as he can—even as far as us, today, and indeed beyond.
Other poems in this section focus on scientists and explorers of the near past and present, drawing a lineage between them and scientists who came before. In a poem dedicated to Edwin Hubble, for instance, his cat is praised as the helper he needed to design his telescope. Here, too, the small and everyday are juxtaposed with the large and unknowable, and both small and large seem to help each other find their perspective and voice. The cat, it turns out, assists Hubble in a manner unique to cats:
Fetch him offerings
of mice, lizards, birds,
a dragonfly for his amusement.
And once he has “… receded, / too far, too fast to follow,” there’s nothing left to do but, in true feline form, “watch for him at the window.”
The collection’s final section, “Space Dust,” turns its focus more inward, looking at the small ways we can understand both ourselves and the vast immensity of space that’s both around and inside us. This section’s last poem, “Holding You,” for example, offers a moving recognition that no matter how far we travel, physically or imaginatively, we always need to be grounded somewhere, and to someone. In this case, that somewhere is earth, and that someone is a child: “In the dark, / I lifted you out of sleepiness.” No matter how wide and broad and unknowable the universe might be, we can still find bits of knowledge and understanding in the small beings we hold in our arms:
… in that vastness of length
only I had the privilege
of holding you.
There’s a sense in this last poem, and in all of the poems in this collection, that the poet knows we might be intimidated by the universe, but that we need not be. The universe might be large and unknowable, but it’s also present in the smallest of moments, ones that are truly human-sized. After all, we’re all made of “star stuff,” as Carl Sagan famously said, and maybe one of the best ways to start to understand stars and the universe as a whole is to look closely and compassionately within.