Edges & Fray

"The mind might learn to mimic the forms it considers, and so learn love's fundamental lesson—how to disentangle us from ourselves, and be woven into the nest that is the world. 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

"Vogel gifts us the body of the book and the carefully woven nest as twinned shelters—stays against our own ephemerality. Her lyrical meditations plait the threads of body and language into a beautiful "architecture for that secret unsayable center."—Amaranth Borsuk, author of The Book

"Delicacy reigns over and in and all through this work; it's poised on a fragility that keeps our attention at the quick, and yet, like the birds' nests at its core, it's also extremely resilient, with the lovely toughness of unlikely evolutionary forms. This one finely, precisely, interweaves thought, thread, grasses, language, string Above all, the delicacy is in the light touch with which Vogel makes these connections, which are all the more radiant for that. Among the exquisite photographs, there a few nests that include fragments of newspaper or other texts—they seem emblematic of the book as a whole: language here indeed becomes a home, a shelter and an occasion for life."—Cole Swensen, author of On Walking On