Edges & Fray (excerpt)
It began before I could speak, when speech was a thing that happened to me. The reverberations of my mother’s voice like a current, a timbre, my physical body existing in its wake. It began when I pretended to read, to write. I am two years old. I am reading, but I cannot yet read. I am writing with a stick through the dirt in my backyard. I know I am speaking with something very large and invisible by doing this.
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Feature Date
- July 11, 2020
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Copyright © 2020 by Danielle Vogel
Wesleyan University Press
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Renee Gladman
Danielle Vogel is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and herbalist working at the intersections of poetry, ecology, somatics, and ceremony. She is the author of Edges & Fray, The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity, and Between Grammars. She teaches at Wesleyan University and makes her home in New England with the writer and artist Renee Gladman.
Middletown, Connecticut
"The mind might learn to mimic the forms it considers, and so learn love's fundamental lesson—how to disentangle us from ourselves, and be woven into the nest that is the world. Danielle Vogel is an 'architect of relation,' and Edges & Fray is a book of thought's loving, living obedience to form. It is one of the lessons we need most right now."
—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Of Silence & Song
"Vogel gifts us the body of the book and the carefully woven nest as twinned shelters—stays against our own ephemerality. Her lyrical meditations plait the threads of body and language into a beautiful 'architecture for that secret unsayable center.'"
—Amaranth Borsuk, author of The Book
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