Shadow Architect

“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.”— The Seattle Times

"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." — Publishers Weekly

"...a sincere exploration of spirituality and the line between the abstract and the concrete..." — Library Journal

How are words made, and how do they derive power? These are the questions at the core of Emily Warn’s Shadow Architect , 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. Shadow Architect 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.

The result is an alluring, postmodernist take on how language means: an architecture not only of shadows, but of “correspondences, analogies, clues, / binaries, metaphors, keys.”

To invent the alef-beit,
decipher the grammar of crows,
read a tangle of bare branches
with vowels of the last leaves
scrawling their jittery speech
on the sky’s pale page.

Emily Warn , author of two previous books of poetry, lives in Seattle and Chicago, where she is the editor of the Poetry Foundation’s website.