Songs from the Astral Bestiary

Poetry. Think of a deer, nervously alert, stepping into a meadow hushed with dawn light. That is the way language moves in Tiff Dressen’s poetry. Every pause, every space in this work seems charged by a presence that holds both promise and danger. Addressed to a mysterious Other, these messages arrive from an interior so deep as to become exterior, extended from your solar heart / to your sun blade. Dressen, returning to poetry’s sources in the elemental, offers oracular voicings–sure in their hesitation, bold in their trembling–in which, with dreamlike clarity, one can see / the whole earth / breathing.–Andrew Joron