Via

Poet Claire DeVoogd''s first book explores what happens to speech, history, and the future when approached from an imagined position after ending--after after--charting a path from an unreal "before" to modernity.

"Claire DeVoogd has a capacious mind. Her poetry has the commotion of history''s frantic details and grand movements, and a metaphysical silence that is post-apocalyptic. VIA is a road for visionary readers."--Robert Glück"

"A passionate eulogy for life on this earth, VIA represents an Errand into the wilderness of our contemporary era. DeVoogd''s poetry and prose is in correspondence with the twelfth-century poet Marie de France whose chivalric Lais offer a cartography through our collective consciousness in these apocalyptic times via the ''undertow and marvel'' of language and history. ''Words extend around worlds'' and we go on."--Susan Howe

"There''s a remarkable agility in Claire DeVoogd''s poetry, a tension from line to line and image to image that is wickedly smart and wickedly spooky. Somewhere between ''a cathedral of every pink'' and ''a moss so green it bleeds real blood'' she conjures old souls into new bodies and fleshes out the hope that lurks in apocalyptic dreams."--Lisa Jarnot

"Near the end of VIA, Claire DeVoogd writes of her interest in the ways worlds extend around words. When I read that I felt like I''d been struck by lightning. Actually, I''d already been struck by lightning a million times while reading VIA, and DeVoogd''s worlds/words extension just crystallized that experience. VIA is the closest experience I''ve ever had to time-traveling via poems, with Claire''s addresses to Marie de France leading us to Paradiso as Apocalypse and/or vice versa. The thing is, this book is insanely pleasurable. A scroll of refusals in hyper-inclusive stacks of couplets? Check. The sense of maybe seeing every painting everywhere all at once? Check. Total formal command in informal service of exhausted expansion? Yeah. I love this book so much."--Anselm Berrigan

Poetry.