North | Rock | Edge

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 vanishing into salt-tinged white space. Over the arc of this remarkable book, reading Shetland with body and mind transforms into a nearly apophatic "transcorporeal" ecstasy as chill and wind-blown and total as the elements themselves. -Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days SUSAN TICHY is the author of six previous books, most recently The Avalanche Path in Summer (Ahsahta, 2019), a muscle-memory of a life in mountains, and Trafficke (Ahsahta, 2015), a mixed-form investigation of family, race, and language spanning from Reformation Scotland to the abolition of slavery in Maryland. She has written extensively about war and its human consequences, including the volumes Gallowglass (Ahsahta, 2010), Bone Pagoda (Ahsahta, 2007), and A Smell of Burning Starts the Day (Wesleyan, 1988). Her first book The Hands in Exile (Random House, 1983) was selected for the National Poetry Series. Her work has been published in the US, UK, and Australia, and been recognized by numerous residencies and awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Now Professor Emerita at George Mason University, she lives in Colorado. https://susantichy.com/