Shadow Architect - Softcover

Warn, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556592779 ISBN 13: 9781556592775

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2008

Synopsis

“Emily Warn is one tough poet. . . . She not only takes on God but also juggles the hot coals of memory and wrestles her way to an honest spiritual life.”—The Seattle Times

"Warn has created a serious meditation on Jewish prayer and cosmogony, in lyrical prose and in accessible verse, a book that belongs not only on poetry shelves, but amid other Judaica and books of prose and verse on religious themes." —Publishers Weekly

"...a sincere exploration of spirituality and the line between the abstract and the concrete..." —Library Journal

How are words made, and how do they derive power? These are the questions at the core of Emily Warn's Shadow Architect, organized around the twenty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet. Mystics have seen that alphabet as a key to divine intent, since God brought the world into being through speech. But Warn takes a poet's view rather than a theologian's: she sees the alphabet's power to reveal the nature of invention, and the limits of language and knowledge. Shadow Architect channels this power not only through word but through image: each poem begins with an illumination of a Hebrew letter. Within the set boundaries of this alphabet, Warn generates a rich polyphony, uniting her own distinctly American poetics with the language of sacred texts and commentaries.

The result is an alluring, postmodernist take on how language means: an architecture not only of shadows, but of “correspondences, analogies, clues, / binaries, metaphors, keys.”

To invent the alef-beit,
decipher the grammar of crows,
read a tangle of bare branches
with vowels of the last leaves
scrawling their jittery speech
on the sky's pale page.

Emily Warn, author of two previous books of poetry, lives in Seattle and Chicago, where she is the editor of the Poetry Foundation's website.

About this title

About the Author

Emily Warn is the editor for the Poetry Foundation website, which won a 2007 "Best of the Web" award. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she is the author of two books of poems. She lives in Chicago and Seattle.

Reviews

Warn's third collection is organized around the Hebrew alphabet: each of its 22 sections corresponds to a Hebrew letter and consists of one short poem, one longer poem, one prose poem and a trio of quotations (from Rabbinical writers, Asian religious texts or secular literature). Warn's clear, inviting lines draw on the shapes of the letters, the Hebrew words that contain them, their significance in Jewish mysticism, and the connections Warn finds in Jewish history, from the Bible to the present day. The resulting poems are occasionally too clear for their own good, but they often find inspiration in the primordial living Torah, circulating in the letters/ as trees circulate light. Examining the letter Yud—which sounds like a Y and looks like a hovering comma, and whose name means hand, as in hand of God—Warn imagines a prayer book and a clock/ which wait with you until dawn// to help you wrestle the dark/ back into God's other hand. Mostly, Warn has created a serious meditation on Jewish prayer and cosmogony, in lyrical prose and in accessible verse, a book that belongs not only on poetry shelves, but amid other Judaica and books of prose and verse on religious themes. (June)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1556592779
• ISBN 13: 9781556592775
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80