In this brave, elegiac debut, How to Prove a Theory, Nicole Tong relies on empirical evidence to construct meaning in the wake of a series of losses that include a childhood lost to trauma, a best friend lost following childbirth, a brother-in-law, a father, and a generation of children in the poet's hometown after a water contamination event. In the face of loss, the poet describes grief as embodied: "I know / neither how to hold you up nor where / to safely place you down." Revelation's uncanny comfort comes as the "process called trust / keeps happening."

"Balanced between before and after, breathes Nicole Foreman Tong's How to Prove a Theory, a collection of poems impeccably made. If poetry can work as solace in the face of loss, these poems are the proof. Like a sieve, or a net, it is as though Tong understands the delicate necessity of openings in order to hold onto anything: 'The present always wants/ another passing between/ worlds.' Quite simply, this is a beautiful debut."
— Sally Keith, author of River House

"The evidence Nicole Tong's How to Prove a Theory offers is a testimony of storms and tides, of memory and tested insights, each deeply moving poem a thought experiment, a theory to explain the inexplicable... Grief runs through the book, a grief that threatens with each new storm surge to sweep away everything in its path, and yet does not. The poems themselves are the bulwark of resistance, of resilience against loss. The poet never surrenders—not to the defenses of numbness or to the escape of self-pity. Instead, like Dickinson, whom Tong aptly invokes, she writes of loss and its aftermath with courageous intensity and taut lyric beauty. I already can't wait to read this amazing young poet's next book!"
— Jennifer Atkinson, author of The Thinking Eye