At the intersection of metaphysics and quantum mechanics lies a vast area of exploration for curious minds. Among these explorations, perhaps one of the most compelling is how our ancient spiritual traditions can be reframed in the context of modern science, where we can examine and understand them in new ways.

Joseph L. Bensinger’s "The Nested Soul: Poems of the Psyche" does just that. Through this lens, Bensinger explores the cycle of the soul from its birth into the world to its return to universal unity. Along the way, he connects together the energy of love, the pursuit of knowledge and the tug of fate.

Bensinger explores these concepts through the medium of verse as a vehicle of imagery and metaphor to make his ideas relatable to the familiar, whether logically or emotionally. He calls upon the physical and natural world — a sunrise, a garden, the ocean — as tools to understanding how a spark of knowledge becomes a steady flame of becoming, how we are all connected at the roots in invisible and symbiotic ways, how time can be full of boundless possibilities and yet be a bounded whole containing past and future within an “endless now.”

He calls upon familiar Judeo-Christian stories — the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel — unveiling their wisdom in a new light. In Bensinger’s capable hands, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil yields a taste that succumbs to insatiable hunger, while the tower represents the force of united egoism and its destruction leads to a different type of unification that flows with change, growth and contradiction: “True governance breathes where voices blend, / not in the tower, but where free paths bend.”

While the poems overlap in imagery and subject matter, there are no two poems that feel redundant to each other. Bensinger uncovers fresh perspectives each time, building on the previous poems yet moving the ideas forward in new ways. The careful reader will enjoy revelation after revelation of interconnections between the concepts in The Nested Soul, all part of “the warp and weft” of the fabric of reality from an unseen loom.

Another notable area in which Bensinger’s work succeeds is in illuminating challenging scientific principles such as the nature of space-time, wave-particle duality and quantum entanglement. It’s a great example of the value of imaginative writing in shaping our understanding of complex and unfamiliar ideas.

If the subject matter of "The Nested Soul" seems too esoteric for some poetry lovers, fear not. Bensinger does a stellar job of framing his work with a Preface and Introduction that provides gentle guidance and insight for the verses that follow, without stripping them of the magical co-creation of meaning that occurs between reader and poet.

This co-creation is perhaps the greatest gift of "The Nested Soul" as we explore our own beliefs and ideas alongside Bensinger’s. As is the case with universal consciousness — in what he terms “the veil beyond knowing” — there is room for many possibilities, and even contradictions, existing side by side. And Bensinger teases even these apart to find the connection between light and shadow, good and evil, joy and sorrow. One cannot exist without the other.

"The Nested Soul" reads like beautiful verse, with an attention to imagistic detail and the music of language, and feels like a journey of ideas that you’ll want to continue beyond the final page.