"In Kevin Young’s anthology The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, he writes, 'The thing about death is: it isn’t symbolic, but very real.' The poems in Nicole Tong’s How to Prove a Theory, are very real; the grief she explores...is both mundane and expansive, ever-present as breath. And yet, by transforming her pain into the vivid poems in this collection, Tong has created a place for her grief to live outside of her own body." --Anita Olivia Koester, Fork and Page