118

In 2016, the periodic table of elements lists 118 named, confirmed chemical elements, of which eighty are stable, a good dozen are unstable but naturally occurring on Earth, and all other creations of particle physics that can be produced with their tools for increasingly smaller fractions of a second. This strictly beautiful order of their material building blocks faces an overwhelmingly tangled variety of objects and living beings, phenomena and processes, which language struggles to define and convey, reflecting and transforming them in its vocabularies. The aim and play of this book is to poetically capture an elementary selection of these objects - from salt to spirit, from monster to fluff, from parallel earth to cress and stuff. Such an inventory is inexhaustible and correspondingly fragmentary, each object.