Mathy Lines from the Poet Laureate

     Born in New York City (1950) and of Asian heritage, poet Arthur Sze is the 25th US Poet Laureate (named on September 15, 2025) and the first Asian American to hold that position.   In the October 20, 2025 issue of The New Yorker, we find Sze's poem, "Library of Congress,"  which opens with these somewhat mathy lines:

        You peer down a lit corridor
        on the fifth tier of stacks
        where a million books breathe
        on shelves, here's a book
        on neutrinos, captured in Antarctica,
        here's another on solar flares.
        A curator displays a book
        in Vai script and points to a triangle
        with two dots, you wonder . . . 

Mathematics organizes libraries!

More poetry from Sze can be found here;  
scroll down below the bio to find titles and links.