Helene

Poetry. Deborah Poe's 19th century heroine Hélène finds herself in the elaborate trap of a 'factory-convent, ' manufacturing silk in western France--and her only release is the fantasy of producing it, instead, in China. Poe handles the implications and associations of these very different worlds with wrenching clarity. But finally, it is language--'We all our song within which voice finds its own escape'--that offers the window through which Hélène, and we, effect that escape. Poe's handling of language throughout the book is nothing less than liberating, and yet it's also arresting--it's often, in short, simply breathtaking, while her acrobatically precise and dynamic balance between research and attention allows the reader to be simultaneously transported beyond and riveted to the present. A major accomplishment, and a haunting one.--Cole Swensen

In this remarkable lineated novella, Deborah Poe's concentrated images accrete & transform: 'orange-edged' becomes 'gold, ' silk & lives are bartered, nuns see yet do not say. Poe's brilliantly rhythmic prose lines both interrogate & untangle fixed notions of genre & narration, spinning conversation between white spaces while experimenting with utterance & its antecedent silences; 'I could think of no conversation to start' becomes 'I can feel your loom all the way over here/a chest silent, full of light.' In parts old-fashioned, sepia, handwritten, in parts postmodern patchwork lyric, the artist behind this work is generously capable of holding the paradox of distance & disappearance in proximity, inviting us to consider ceasing 'the mind's clattering' via an astonishingly moving feminist lullaby to times & places past.--Sandra Doller