Vogel, Danielle: Between Grammars

Between Grammars by Danielle Vogel (Noemi Press, paperback)

Publication Date: March 1, 2015

Publisher Marketing: Poetry. First in a trilogy of texts, BETWEEN GRAMMARS is a book-length narrative poem composed of prose-fragments that investigates the boundaries between books and the bodies that read and write them. Within these pages, language becomes a living organism, as "Grammars cohere, lap, unfold. A slanting field upon the other." This text explores the porous architectures built between people and their vocabulary—how we meet inside these architectures and what we're able to exchange there. As we read, "Language tides the skinline," collapsing the distinctions between self and other.

"What is the relationship between book and body? This lovely text, both spare and voluminous, invokes an intimate register in which letters become liquid garments. Vogel adeptly 'lets the ledge of a sentence wax.' Her white space brims. Her parentheses cup breath to your ear. This book invites you to stand in an alphabetic current, abandon the distance between reader and text, pet words with your eye. BETWEEN GRAMMARS transcribes lament for the limits of language and simultaneously conveys a hopefulness for poetry as an innately connective impulse."—Laynie Browne

"Because 'a body loosens itself across an alphabet,' because 'an absent word unsettl[es] the collarbone's concavity,' because 'the vowels layering, breathe,' Danielle Vogel's ravishing and profound work resides in one as a thrilling visceral experience. Never has a reading encounter felt so fully embodied—the vibration and motions and shapes of language inside, transforming the day, long after the book is closed."—Carole Maso