Atomic Theory 7, a collaboration in the truest sense between the fiercely-imagined poems of Shann Ray and the sacramental art of Trinh Mai, considers a most uncommon union between the lover and the beloved: the body at rest and war, in beauty and peace, in violence and despair, in the finality of darkness and the atomic fusion that beckons new life. The unity between dark and light in Atomic Theory 7 is open, composed of untold force, robustly unknowable, and intimately attuned. Even the most forbidding trauma is not in vain. From the ashes of holocaust, love becomes an essential human gift found not only in casting one’s eyes upward, but in visceral, physical gestures: a healing hand on the chest of friends and strangers, a loving embrace between enemies. The breath of the holy over the wristbones of a child. A touch of the numinous at the zenith of the shoulder blades. God in all things. Breath. Whisper. Song. Here it is not the Divine who commits genocide but people, and in the heartrending aftermath, we are given the grace to meet one another again, kiss each other in peace, and go forth fused with atomic responsibility.
