Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery (2021), and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019). She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, POETS.org, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. Her poem ”Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online.  She writes for The Kenyon Review blog. She recently edited a special chemistry poetry portfolio for Pleiades, and is finishing a series called The Atomic Sonnets, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. Find her at 7TrainLove.org

“Ben-Oni humanizes the study of physics from stars to particles: how can we fit into a world we cannot see, does it matter if our reality is not as real as we once thought, and do our deep feelings of loss, joy, and grief mean anything when placed against infinite space?“
—Mark Spero, Poetry Northwest

“In the Alice James Award-winning third collection by Rosebud Ben-Oni, If This Is the Age We End Discovery, the poet sings; these epics could be described as Latinx surrealism. The poems are electric and musical, with varying forms; some occupy an entire page in tight stanzaic forms, while others expand into loose wispy phrases that occupy only parts of the page. Ben-Oni takes readers through marvelous soundscapes derived from the algorithms of imagination...”
—Ruben Quesada, The Harvard Review

“If This Is the Age We End Discovery is art, and it defies physics in a way I’ve never seen a poet do. The chemistry allows the book to be out of this world and grounded at the same time. Ben-Oni is both mystical and mortal—confounding me as a reader and yet intermittently drawing me in more deeply. While the title refers to the end of discovery, this book exudes an energy of newness and mystery waiting to be discovered.”
—Liz Harmer and Sam Risak, Tab Journal

“Ben-Oni shows her math in all of its fierce, amal­ga­mat­ing ener­gy that man­ages to build even as it nul­li­fies. If This Is The Age We End Dis­cov­ery expands the bound­aries of Jew­ish poet­ics for­mal­ly and the­mat­i­cal­ly, and its com­bi­na­tion of mys­ti­cism, sci­ence, and verse leave all fields transformed.”
—Alli­son Pitinii Davis for Jewish Book Council

“There are realms beyond our own. Rosebud Ben-Oni has seen them… If This Is the Age We End Discovery expresses the ethereality of the cosmos as well as a separate galaxy of trauma, loss, and survival… In ‘All Palaces Are Temporary Palaces,’ a child niece calls the speaker with urgent question about precious metals, asteroids, and the meaning of life…Lovingly, the speaker attends to the inquiries of her niece; the two muse about quarks, space weddings, and human existence for so long the speaker misses her train…In both poetry and science, ideas must be revisited, hypotheses must be revised.”
—Rita Mookerjee, The American Poetry Review

“To experience Rosebud Ben-Oni's If This Is The Age We End Discovery, is to wrestle in a simulated universe filled with horses, anti horses, wanton jellyfish and vampire bunnies with fangs of squarks. These whimsical and eerie components braid throughout the collection with filigree precision, and function within a kind of syntactical callisthenic--brackets, double colons, precise enjambment, and tiny exponents--so as to conjure the form of a mosaicked scientific theorem.”
—Ezra Solway, Shining Rock Poetry Anthology & Book Review

“If This Is the Age We End Discovery, Rosebud Ben-Oni’s second full-length poetry collection, wrestles with physics, and also with illness, and also with God, pinning us to moments where we must confront the unknown, holding our attention on uncertainty and questioning without granting us resolution’s rest. Through period-bulleted fragments and sprawling, page-full stanzas, we’re never still — we’re caught in the act; we’re wrestling, too, with why — and how — we exist, with why we suffer, with how we love.”
—Rachel Mennies, On the Seawall

“…the scientific language in these poems bubbles, zaps, overflows, and spins off into new dimensions. The poems immerse us into the same matter that comprises atoms, at once strong, unpredictable, and mysterious forces. As readers, we see the inner workings of what could be possible through physics as we know it — or what might happen if we were to nullify all that we know and give into the forces that underpin our physical existence. These are poems of discovery, crafted by a poet who unlocks and unleashes the extraordinary power tied to each word she wields.”
—Scarlett Eliza Wardrop, Entropy Magazine

“In this unforgettable addition to the corpus of speculative Latinx poetics, Rosebud Ben-Oni writes what at times feels like a simultaneously utopian and dystopian manifesto for our time … The image-work of poetry here involves transmuting what we see, and it is a work borne of refusals, always beginning anew”
—Urayoán Noel, The Latinx Project

“It’s rare to use delight to describe a new work of poetry in this touchy, faux optimistic age. Yet that’s exactly what this on-target, off-kilter collection, equal parts playground and burial ground, offers. … It’s hard to co-opt a toon-tome like this, one that eludes categorization into any of the prevailing facile categories, those that force us all to be an inconvenient sociological fact.”
—Herman Van den Reeck, Caesura Magazine

“Ben-Oni's deft and exacting proficiency with craft … give the overall impression of being whisked through a sort of alternate universe amusement park of poems where rides are designed as much for deep wonderment as they are for enjoyment. This is clearly the labor of a consummate engineer.”
—KT Herr, The Rupture

“The powerful and provocative second collection from Ben-Oni tackles major existential issues—creation, nullification, personal experience, objective truth—with grace, humor, and linguistic flair.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“Falling ill and witnessing the body’s confrontation with its flawed and mortal nature, the speaker in Rosebud Ben-Oni’s finely wrought poems wonders about what it is that we can truly know— What we can attribute to agency or fiction, and whether science can provide a truer slate upon which we might work out the mysteries of human loss, desire, and suffering.”
—Luisa A. Igloria, RHINO Reviews

“Ben-Oni’s poems often spray across the page, her lines reaching for the edges as if they seek to uncover the outlines of our tenuous existence.”
—Nick Rickpatrazone, The Millions

“Through these breathtakingly elegant poems, Rosebud Ben-Oni proves once and for all that poetry and science are sisters. If This is the Age We End Discovery maps, like a series of carefully wrought equations, the physics of connection and loss. What does a love song echo against when it spins into space? What symmetries and risks are woven into our very code? How do we live wired for uncertainty, in the yawn of the universe we can’t control? Readers will find it impossible to escape this collection’s unparalleled gravitational pull.”
—Jennifer Militello, author of A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments

“Rosebud Ben-Oni's poetry is exquisite and astounding. This is a poet who is going places.”
—Noelle Kocot

"I experience much boredom these days with the world and its predictable cruelties or poetry and its predictable safeties. This phenomenon of a book launches me with its wonder into space and the multiverse and then somehow discovers compassion where we might expect to find only absence of heat or light. Ben-Oni rides with and wrestles the horse of theory to the event horizon's brink, and at the point that empirical proof can take her no further, love transmutes undoing into possibility unimagined."
—Kyle Dargan, author of Anagnorisis