Shadow Architect (Paperback)
Description
Poetry. 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."
