Author Description

A warning serves as bedrock ethic for Susan Tichy's North Rock Edge: "Beware a thought / untaught by walking." Perhaps it is a poem's unique power to warn us against its own nature-the language can make of itself a world that supersedes the fact of the real one. Tichy will have none of it. Hers is a poetry that learns to think only by what the world offers as thinkable, the mineral fact of rock, the infinite force of ocean, and the contemplative strife of those potencies colliding. Any thought not engendered by such encounter isn't to be trusted-a thing the mind can do merely by itself. But what experience gives us is its own epistemology, a perception not of landscape, but landscape as perception. -Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Variations on Dawn and Dusk Susan Tichy's new collection is a thrilling encounter between a poet who relishes challenge and a world both 'fleeting/ and fixed, ' in the words of Susan Howe. We might say that the poems are testament to what happens when you focus on 'the thing itself'-on 'a shatter of sea crow-blue/ then metal bright'-except, this is a world where there is never only one thing happening. Tichy defines her own aesthetic challenge as 'how/ to speak before/ a planet's/ broken openness'. Her solution is a verse that is flexible and nimble, a poetry that is always aware of the breath. Perhaps this awareness of breath in her craft is what makes her work here distinctively American. -Tom Pow, author of Dear Alice - Narratives of Madness North Rock Edge continues Susan Tichy's commitment to thinking on foot, to making poetic language immersive and bound to the ecological specifics of place. Here her poiesis takes shape largely in the ecotone between dune and sea, on the rocky shores and at the wrack-lines of the Shetland Islands. The resulting poems reflect the never-ending flux and eternal contingency of tidal places; choppy waves of fluent musical phrasing get caught up in jump-cuts before vanishin