All of a sudden it’s already November, and with it comes darker days, snow on the way, and the inevitable mad dash to the end of 2016. It’s the time of year when all I want to do is camp out in front of a fireplace with a blanket and a mug of tea for the duration and just read, read, read.

Unfortunately, it’s also that time of year that many of us don’t have much time to read at all, let along all day long. Luckily though, I have just the fix, and it comes in the form of some perfect fall poetry that’s full of plenty of science. And, it’s just as happily read straight through on that rare leisurely evening as it is savored in bits and pieces here and there.

The Robot Scientist's Daughter

If a chilly fall afternoon of nuclear physics, robotics, and the Appalachian landscape sounds up your alley, then Jeannine Hall Gailey’s The Robot Scientist’s Daughter is the book for you. From the first poem, "Cesium Burns Blue," right through to the last, this book is equal parts luminous and ominous, delving into the ethical and environmental implications of building a nuclear plant right in the middle of Appalachia. Here, the woods are glowing with foxfire and the "Keep Out" signs are mysterious, magical, and looming.

Gailey's father was a robot scientist who researched nuclear waste cleanup, and her childhood near the Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee forms the backdrop for this book. The poems marvel at the simple beauty of the elements—"Copper burns green. Sodium yellow, / strontium red." They playfully personify Geiger counters—"My father's Geiger counter click-clicked / its swaying tongue at me." They are populated by voltmeters and oscilloscopes. Anyone who grew up in the labs of their scientist parents will feel at home in these poems. Anyone who didn't will be transported back to that first time stepping into their high school biology, chemistry, or physics lab.

And yet, threat is always quietly pushing up against all the wonder at this scientific world and all the beauty of the Appalachian foothills. "Cesium lights the rain," Gailey writes, "is absorbed in the skin, / unstable, unstable, / dancing away, ticking away / in bones, fingernails, brains." More than one poem returns to the radiant beauty (and, of course, terror) of the Oak Ridge janitor's garden, “where mutations burgeoned in the soil,” roses and tomatoes "gigantic and marvelous from that ground sick with uranium."

Though clearly drawing on the author’s childhood, this book cleverly invents and constantly reinvents a character of "The Robot Scientist’s Daughter," mutating poem after poem into variations on this same theme, over a dozen of them taking the same title as their starting point. This is a character who "insisted upon the organization / of genus and species among her stuffed animals"—one of my favorite details in the whole book. This is a character who comfortably and simultaneously inhabits the parallel worlds of reality, mythology, pop culture, and science fiction in stride.

These are poems that are dense, thoughtful, nimble. They are both wildly expansive and frighteningly close to home. These are poems that delight in scientific and natural beauty even as they expose the terror of living in a world where nuclear science is a reality. Mostly, these are poems that keep you coming back for more.

The Cardiologist's Daughter

Similarly titled, Natasha Kochicheril Moni's The Cardiologist’s Daughter also engages with her father's scientific profession, looking to the language of medicine to explore the heart not only as organ but as that which ties us together across oceans and generations.

These poems find the human and the everyday in the hospital and in the lab. In the poem "We Are Doing Rounds," the speaker writes of her father that "In the EKG lab, you value / peaks. Someone's beat charted / in ink, an arc toward normalcy." In "The Cardiologist Speaks," she imagines herself into her father's earlier years as a doctor, "36-hour / shifts and the tea never strong enough." She writes that he learned to "palpate the pulse of the hospital." Medicine is always living and breathing, never static.

The language of the heart, of medicine and anatomy, is natural to this narrator, and these are poems that celebrate that. In the poem titled "On an Interview to Rent Space from a Chiropractor, I Discover a Mutual Admiration for Handling Skulls," Moni writes, "I speak / the tongue of sutures, what seals / bone to bone what breathes if given / space." And later, we see how "the Cardiologist, his daughter love to learn / the language of mater: dura, / arachnoid, pia—whisper / the sound CSF/ would make…"

This is a shared language, and an intimate one, a language that has been passed down from father to daughter. In its exploration of not only her father's and her own medical careers, but also of the poet's Indian and Dutch heritage, the book uses this shared language to delve into the many ways we are always and inevitably tied to our families. So much of this book is about home, both leaving it and returning to it, both its permanence and its transience—in short, perfect subject matter for this time of year.

In one touching poem, set on the day after Thanksgiving with all its attendant leftovers, the narrator considers her father's recent heart attack, reflecting that "the study of hearts only instructs / so much. How to mend / a pumping mass, preserve / what will not keep." There is an elegiac tone to many of these poems, mourning either what is already lost or what will eventually be lost.

These poems are crisp and taught, sometimes fragmentary, always conversational, often surprising. We "tip the skull to locate light," ends one of them, and indeed, that is what each of these poems do too—claiming the language of medicine as a way forward through this world.

Whichever book you pick up this fall season (maybe both?), I hope you too manage to snatch a few minutes of reading time by a real or theoretical fireplace.