Sixteen For Psyche
Addison Mayhew
Major: New Media Design
Genre/Medium: Poetry, Collection assembled in Adobe InDesign, art made in Procreate
About the Work:
Sixteen for Psyche is a poetry collection structured around the phases of NASA’s Psyche mission, tracing a progression from engineering design to interplanetary travel to orbital encounter. The work draws from the language of systems engineering, trajectory analysis, and mission operations, using procedural and technical vocabulary as both structure and subject.
The collection is divided into three sections—Constraint, Persistence, and Exposure—each reflecting a phase of the mission and a corresponding shift in poetic form. In Constraint, highly structured poems mirror the rigor of design reviews, testing, and launch preparation. In Persistence, the work transitions into free verse, reflecting the long-duration continuity of spaceflight, where motion is gradual and cumulative. In Exposure, the poems become increasingly experimental, destabilizing form and language as the spacecraft reaches Psyche, a metallic asteroid believed to be the exposed core of a protoplanet. Read more…
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