Reading Novalis in Montana

This tour de force marks a breakthrough in Melissa Kwasny’s poetic investigation of a collective consciousness.

Drawing inspiration from Novalis (1772–1801), a poet who, like the other adherents of early German Romanticism, believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, Kwasny divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions—indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism, surrealism, ...