Alana Siegel was born in Los Angeles in 1985. Archipelago is her first full-length book of poetry. Her chapbooks include The Occupations, Semata, and Words from Ra Ra Junction. She presently lives in Berkeley, California, collaborating at the burgeoning Bay Area Public School
The speed of thought-not some rapid pulse or lickety-split
rhythmicity (Alana Siegel's pulse is even enough); but as I let fit
the movement of my reading to the movement of her language, I sense
a lightning velocity to the flash of her intelligence; the work of
relation and resonance that is operative behind the screen of
speech; the work of mind and heart that allows for rich and
multi-phasic connections wrought in image, sound, reference, and
soul's release, to find their proper interval without requiring
pause or interrupt to wrest encrypted sense from surface seas of
text so that I am ever with her, far far out on the farthest reach
of herARCHIPELAGO. -- Charles Stein
She is a swimmer bursting out of the smooth surface poems of so
many recent American years, out into a risky air where poetry
breathes beyond the poem-as-commodity into something greater, a
continuity of articulate presence. There's something Wagnerian
about Siegel's work, a sense of 'endless melody' undistracted by
conventions of closure and easy formal strategies. It's brave,
because it doesn't give the reader easy units to grasp. Instead,
her poetry strives into openness, lives up to the deepest challenge
of the past century, creating not artifacts but processes, long
dances for agile readers. -- Robert Kelly
Resonant and stylized, Archipelago is full of big questions about
how to best live, how to speak and what to say, how to have
empathy, in short, how to be and be attentive to the complications
of this time, a time that might just be an apocalypse, but an
apocalypse that is probably the beginning not the ending. Poetry
has a long and esteemed tradition of inquiry, of philosphizing.
Archipelago meets this tradition and raises it, asks it question
after question. -- Juliana Spahr
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
