The Universe at the Point of Contraction

In the tradition of Pacific Northwest Gothic, these poems explore intimate and expansive themes of place, leaving, return, and resilience amid beauty and degradation on the shores of the Salish Sea.

Dills’s brilliant poems open, echo, ache, celebrate memory, loss, longing, the body carrying the weight of work and time, & give us an extraordinary collection both intimate & immense.

The poem titles are set in Bodoni 62, a modern interpretation of the work of Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813), a great artist of the printed page. Bodoni brought unique precision to the making of books, attending to proportion, spacing, balance, & the shape of every letter. His type is a dramatic meeting of opposites: the weight of the strong vertical stroke against an almost vanishing hairline; darkness beside light; monumentality beside delicacy. A universe in that tension!

The poems themselves are set in Robert Slimbach’s Arno Pro, named for Florence’s Arno River. Drawing upon the warmth of Renaissance humanist book type, Arno carries the eye gently across the page, allowing the voice of the poem to emerge through the intimate act of reading.

In these poems, the immense contracts into the particular, history into a mother’s hands, time into a photograph, the eternal as a refinery at dawn. This is the universe at the point of contraction: everything vast becomes intimate, everything intimate becomes vast, the page as threshold, as home, Bodoni as the door, Arno as welcome.

Expansion/contraction, weight/light, memory/mystery, the living & the lost, Robert Frost’s homesickness/love sickness, distilled through Randall’s immense lyrical capability, becomes the poem, becomes this collection