Somewhere in Space

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.”