The Making

The Making retells the universe through science and story, tracing the arc of the cosmos from its origin to the present. The poem recounts the early transformations of the universe, the emergence and development of life on Earth, and the broad span of human history, pairing each new phase with a story--stories drawn from Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as from North American Indigenous traditions, Greek myth, and international creation tales and folktales. Coaxing science and history into evocative language while braiding them with tales, the poem sets a human perspective on the pageant of the cosmos and provides an unprecedented synthesis of evolutionary history with literary and religious imagination. The Making is a lyrical and pluralistic creation story of epic scope--a story that illuminates our time of planetary crisis and imagines ways we might press forward.