Deborah Tall

Cover painting by Barbara Kassel

Deborah Tall's most recent book of poems. Selected by Charles Simic for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books.

"The art of prosody, of which Deborah Tall is a master, is a jeweler's art. It is about ascertaining the weight of words, measuring each one of them in turn against silence and time. . . . As we read, line by line, sounds turn into music, words and images grow in meaning. If you believe that this is what all poets do anyway, you are wrong. Only the best of them know how to make us reread with increasing pleasure a few lines of poetry." --Charles Simic, from the introduction to SUMMONS

"A poet who combines a talent for precision with a taste for elusive subjects. Her themes are states of in-between, before birth and after life, in which the "sniffed, sifted, seen/unseen" communicate through corporeal signs. Fragile as these realities may seem, the poems exhibit a tensile strength." --Harvard Review

"Reading Tall's poetry, one is reminded of the sparse elegance of an expensive restaurant in which presentation is aesthetically flawless. . . ." --Library Journal

"Her account of the death of a deer in "Gesture" deserves a place beside William Stafford's well-known "Traveling Through the Dark." --Virginia Quarterly Review