In The Poet & The Architect (Terrapin Books, 2021), Christine Stewart-Nuñez tells the love story of a woman poet given to language and curves and a man architect who designs forms in which to live. Even as she shares their differences, the poems search for shapes within which to love. This book is a love letter to her husband, architect Brian Rex.

My favorite poems of the collection are the poems that examine the relationship between poet and architect, wife and husband. “Intuition Assay” beautifully sets up the dynamic:

Our story isn’t one of love at first sight.
Our introduction felt the way a puzzle piece,
finally placed, reveals an image

And then offers this brilliance:

I can’t see
versions of me in his past: rather, gaps—
what cuts left my shape

Both the poet and the architect have had adult lives before they met. The poems mention a first wife and a scar on his leg from cancer surgery. There have been “cuts” in both of them. Those wounds have prepared them to fit together as if that last puzzle piece falls into place.

Stewart-Nuñez structures the collection in four ever-widening rings. She mentions that she loves loops, spirals, and curves, at the same time that she connects her husband, the architect, with lines and planes, and grids. But this doesn’t wholly explain the significance of the rings. A ring, unlike a circle, can be shaped imperfectly, like life. To ring also means to create loud or vibrating sound, such as the reverberation of a poet’s voice. Boundaries or fences ring and protect, such as Stewart-Nuñez’s “mother-made nets” for her older son, plagued by a storm of seizures (“Site Planning”). As an ornament of the body, a ring can also symbolize eternal love for a couple.

But it’s important to note that architects have a long history of designing in rings and circles, too, and they continue to do so. Apple Park is one well-known example. The husband architect and the younger son, who is “stunned / by /the science museum,” share their enthusiasm and different perspectives on math, science, and form with the poet. Each ring of the book turns out to be a “fractal: a cascade of never-ending, self-similar, repeated elements that change in scale but retain similar shape” (79). Stewart-Nuñez views relationships and history—both personal and public—as fractals.

Although the book reads like a collection of free verse, some of the poems are written in specific forms, even concrete ones, contributing to the obsessive thread of design, form, pattern, and structure. The poet argues that “When articulate, / the structure sings” (36). The poems in The Poet & The Architect sing with grace and sincerity.