Poetry. 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."

Emily Warn is the editor for the Poetry Foundation website, which won a 2007 "Best of the Web" award. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she is the author of two books of poems. She lives in Chicago and Seattle.

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