{"product_id":"shadow-architect-9781556592775","title":"Shadow Architect","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Emily Warn is one tough poet. . . . She not only takes on God but also juggles the hot coals of memory and wrestles her way to an honest spiritual life.\"--\u003ci\u003eThe Seattle Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Warn has created a serious meditation on Jewish prayer and cosmogony, in lyrical prose and in accessible verse, a book that belongs not only on poetry shelves, but amid other Judaica and books of prose and verse on religious themes.\" --\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"...a sincere exploration of spirituality and the line between the abstract and the concrete...\" --\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHow are words made, and how do they derive power? These are the questions at the core of Emily Warn's \u003ci\u003eShadow Architect\u003c\/i\u003e, organized around the twenty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet. Mystics have seen that alphabet as a key to divine intent, since God brought the world into being through speech. But Warn takes a poet's view rather than a theologian's: she sees the alphabet's power to reveal the nature of invention, and the limits of language and knowledge. \u003ci\u003eShadow Architect\u003c\/i\u003e channels this power not only through word but through image: each poem begins with an illumination of a Hebrew letter. Within the set boundaries of this alphabet, Warn generates a rich polyphony, uniting her own distinctly American poetics with the language of sacred texts and commentaries.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe result is an alluring, postmodernist take on how language means: an architecture not only of shadows, but of \"correspondences, analogies, clues, \/ binaries, metaphors, keys.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eTo invent the alef-beit, \u003cbr\u003edecipher the grammar of crows, \u003cbr\u003eread a tangle of bare branches\u003cbr\u003ewith vowels of the last leaves\u003cbr\u003escrawling their jittery speech\u003cbr\u003eon the sky's pale page.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eEmily Warn\u003c\/b\u003e, author of two previous books of poetry, lives in Seattle and Chicago, where she is the editor of the Poetry Foundation's website.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEmily Warn is the editor for the Poetry Foundation website, which won a 2007 \"Best of the Web\" award. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she is the author of two books of poems. She lives in Chicago and Seattle.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Copper Canyon Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50420091322642,"sku":"9781556592775","price":10.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_5dc2adf9-57fa-4276-b26b-40689afb0a4b.jpg?v=1729489551","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/shadow-architect-9781556592775","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}