Somewhere in Space

Talvikki Ansel

Table of Contents

“Talvikki Ansel’s poems in Somewhere in Space create a portal of hope where humans can recover a sense of what it means to be animal on a planet imperiled. Ansel is a twenty-first-century ‘New Englandly’ Dorothy Wordsworth, paying keen, peripatetic, nineteenth-century attention to the salvific slippage among the human, animal, feral, cultured, and terrestrial realms of our moment. The poems in this collection build a cosmology that is atmospheric, pan-geographic, and emotional.” —Lisa Russ Spaar

The poems in Talvikki Ansel’s Somewhere in Space work to locate us in this world and its mix of the made and natural, the cultivated and untamable. Faced with such mysteries and intricacies as the water-conducting tissue of trees, the sensory abilities of vultures, the lives of past writers (Edith Södergran, Bruno Schulz), and fragments of history and our tenuous connections to them, the poems acknowledge the difficulty of authority, yet continue with their forays. Invented characters coexist with observations of mergansers and moths, orioles and cats; “Particulars rock / just inside the breakwater / like conjured-up skiffs.”

Talvikki Ansel is the author of the poetry collections My Shining Archipelago and Jetty and Other Poems, and she is a recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award.