Gravity Assist, the newest collection by Martha Silano, masterfully measures the heights and depths of our earthly visions. Cerebral yet meditative, capacious yet focused, this book soars with investigations and ruminations, love letters, origin stories, and notes on gravitational forces both literal and metaphorical. Through her usual nimble style, Silano deftly weaves the humanistic and the cosmic, delivering a series of up-close and personal examinations of phenomena as far flung as copepods, nebula, trilobites, preening cormorants, or “Reaching out to soothe you, /the twisted arms of the last of three species of endemic /sea stars ripping themselves apart, arms crawling away in opposite directions, insides spilling out.”