“Danielle Vogel is an ‘architect of relation,’ and Edges & Fray is a book of thought’s loving, living obedience to form. It is one of the lessons we need most right now.” — Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Of Silence & Song
Edges & Fray is an embodied meditation that cultivates receptivity and deep listening to the ways we inhabit language and its ethereal resilience. Combining close observation of birds’ nests and the writing process, Danielle Vogel brings the reader into communion with language as a mode of presence. The frayed edges of consciousness are carefully arranged to suggest how writing, and the book, can serve as a site of radical transformation. Experimental and deeply grounded, this work is lyrical and patient. The text creates overlapping ecological fields, wherein each field is a system always in a state of becoming. Described as a “series of filaments,” here is one example from the book:
we read debris and make seemingly complete shapes
what we experience :
a series of fragments
and the ethereal impulse
of an entirety
nests have taught me about the miniscule —
— that haunts toward the whole
the book becomes a breathing record
Finding its strength in fragility, Edges & Fray is personal without feeling private, experimental without feeling programmatic. Its construction is intuitive and masterful, its many threads interwoven and intrinsically linked. This is a beautiful and inspiring book at the intersection of poetry, somatics, ecology, and divination.
DANIELLE VOGEL is a cross-genre writer and visual artist. She is the author of numerous other works, and she has contributed chapters to in the anthologies Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) and The Poet’s Novel (forthcoming from Nightboat Books, 2019). Vogel has been a visiting lecturer at Brown University and a visiting artist at the University of Washington at Bothell and Naropa University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Creative Writing at Wesleyan University, where she specializes in contemporary poetry, creative nonficition, documentary and eco-poetics, and cross-genre and interdisciplinary forms.
