Praise for Midlife Calculus

Midlife Calculus is a delight! Kaufmann plays with and infuses mathematical ideas into her poems in ways that are by turns clever, thought-provoking, sobering, and humorous. She rotates a familiar scene on its axis just slightly so that the everyday becomes profound.

—Deirdre Longacher Smeltzer, PhD in Mathematics and co-author of Methods for Euclidean Geometry

If you were to graph Britt Kaufmann's Midlife Calculus, you'd get a sine curve going convex and concave from comfort to danger and back again, approaching infinity. A thought-provoking poetry collection. Britt could teach My Dear Aunt Sally the order of operations for writing lyrically about math.

—Jessy Randall, author of Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science

Poetry’s work of aiding our survival has never been more essential than it is now. Britt Kaufmann’s Midlife Calculus performs this function in startling and refreshing ways, using the language of mathematics to investigate subjects such as the pandemic, the U.S.’s failing educational system, and school shootings while refusing despair, showing readers that the search for a sense of peace is not in vain.

—Daniel Shank Cruz, author of Queering Mennonite Literature and Ethics for Apocalyptic Times