Edges & Fray: on language, presence, and (invisible) animal architectures

by Danielle Vogel

Overview

Poetry, prose, and photographs, explore the edges of language
Edges & Fray is an embodied meditation that cultivates receptivity and deep listening to the ways we inhabit language and its ethereal resilience. Combining close observation of birds' nests and the writing process, Danielle Vogel brings the reader into communion with language as a mode of presence. The frayed edges of consciousness are carefully arranged to suggest how writing, and the book, can serve as a site of radical transformation. Experimental and deeply grounded, this work is lyrical and patient. The text creates overlapping ecological fields, wherein each field is a system always in a state of becoming. Finding its strength in fragility, Edges & Fray is personal without feeling private, experimental without feeling programmatic. Its construction is intuitive and masterful, its many threads interwoven and intrinsically linked. This is a beautiful and inspiring book at the intersection of poetry, somatics, ecology, and divination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819579225
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	12/13/2022
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sold by:	OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Danielle Vogel is a cross-genre writer and visual artist. She is the author of Between Grammars and the artist book Narrative & Nest.

Read an Excerpt

not the format on the page
writing is the retrieval
of material —— to produce a desired, shape
as open : archiving
the word architecture
build within the space of this
thought. sound, shaped
into series becomes
sentence and series

Table of Contents

Title • Edges&Fray • Slowness, Time • Nests • Bird Resources • A Note of Thanks

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The mind might learn to mimic the forms it considers, and so learn love's fundamental lesson—how to disentangle us from ourselves, and be woven into the nest that is the world. Danielle Vogel is an "architect of relation," and Edges & Fray is a book of thought's loving, living obedience to form. It is one of the lessons we need most right now."

— Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Of Silence & Song

"Vogel gifts us the body of the book and the carefully woven nest as twinned shelters—stays against our own ephemerality. Her lyrical meditations plait the threads of body and language into a beautiful "architecture for that secret unsayable center."

— Amaranth Borsuk, author of The Book

"Delicacy reigns over and in and all through this work; it's poised on a fragility that keeps our attention at the quick, and yet, like the birds' nests at its core, it's also extremely resilient, with the lovely toughness of unlikely evolutionary forms. This one finely, precisely, interweaves thought, thread, grasses, language, string Above all, the delicacy is in the light touch with which Vogel makes these connections, which are all the more radiant for that. Among the exquisite photographs, there a few nests that include fragments of newspaper or other texts—they seem emblematic of the book as a whole: language here indeed becomes a home, a shelter and an occasion for life."

— Cole Swensen, author of On Walking On

Editorial Reviews

"The mind might learn to mimic the forms it considers, and so learn love's fundamental lesson—how to disentangle us from ourselves, and be woven into the nest that is the world. Danielle Vogel is an "architect of relation," and Edges & Fray is a book of thought's loving, living obedience to form. It is one of the lessons we need most right now."—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Of Silence & Song

"Vogel gifts us the body of the book and the carefully woven nest as twinned shelters—stays against our own ephemerality. Her lyrical meditations plait the threads of body and language into a beautiful "architecture for that secret unsayable center."—Amaranth Borsuk, author of The Book

"Delicacy reigns over and in and all through this work; it's poised on a fragility that keeps our attention at the quick, and yet, like the birds' nests at its core, it's also extremely resilient, with the lovely toughness of unlikely evolutionary forms. This one finely, precisely, interweaves thought, thread, grasses, language, string Above all, the delicacy is in the light touch with which Vogel makes these connections, which are all the more radiant for that. Among the exquisite photographs, there a few nests that include fragments of newspaper or other texts—they seem emblematic of the book as a whole: language here indeed becomes a home, a shelter and an occasion for life."—Cole Swensen, author of On Walking On

From the Publisher