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