Danielle Blau
Danielle Blau’s Rhyme or Reason: Poets, Philosophers, and the Problem of Being Here Now is forthcoming from W. W. Norton. Her collection mere eye was selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Award and published with an introduction by D. A. Powell, and her poems won first place in the multi-genre Narrative 30 Below Contest. Poetry, short stories, articles, and interviews by Blau appear in The Atlantic, Australian Book Review, The Baffler, The Literary Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Yorker’s book blog, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Saint Ann’s Review, several volumes of the Plume Anthology of Poetry, and elsewhere. Her work has been set to music by composers of various stripes and performed in such venues as Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Carnegie Hall. A graduate of Brown University with an honors degree in philosophy, and of New York University with an MFA in poetry, she curates and hosts the monthly Gavagai Music + Reading Series in Brooklyn, teaches at Hunter College in Manhattan, and lives with her son Kai in Queens.
peep by Danielle Blau
Pub. April 27th, 2022
Winner of the 16th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize
Foreword by the judge, Vijay Seshadri
Danielle Blau’s peep invites you into a world so strange it is utterly familiar, a world from our ancient past that could also be the future—or a twisted version of the present. It is a mirror world where the husk of our culture shows starkly, and yet it is lit by joy, in the words, the verses themselves. peep is uncanny, primal, magical, capturing hopelessness, gridlock, our impact on the environment and those around us, questioning progress and the language we use to speak to each other, each little peep a little life desperate to not pass unnoticed.
Primal. Magical. Imaginative.
What People Are Saying
“peep is a tour de force, and it’s more than a tour de force. It displays deep within itself, for all its intellectual and imaginative power and self-delight, a curious tenderness and vulnerability. The book glories in language and thinking; it’s imaginative and bold; but it’s also intimate. If I were asked to account for this intimacy, especially in the face of all the other effects that Blau realizes, I might say, diffidently, that Blau is the performer of her own experience, but she is also its scholar and critic…”
— Vijay Seshadri
“Danielle Blau obsessively plays with language until she hits something wondrous and strange. Her debut volume, peep, is jaunty and deft, utterly fresh, formally innovative, but it is also filled with secret hurts and sorrows. It has philosophical depths. Buoyant and brimming with linguistic maneuvers, it is ultimately a work of soul-making.”
— Edward Hirsch
“Danielle Blau’s peep cannot be read swiftly. There isn’t verbal-sleight-of-hand in this verse, yet peep challenges a reader to grasp rhythm in form, to internalize meaning and the joy in language. Urban yet measured, these poems demand an active reader who grows into each journey.”
— Yusef Komunyakaa
EXCERPTS
Villanelle
There is an order. Such an order.
Each event a word that must be read
or else, my friend — Today I woke up shorter,
sleep playing pestle to my twin bed’s mortar,
me the poor shaved meat. But no regret —
an order to these things, you see, there’s order.
Each man a crack at playing cosmic sorter.
Within each uncracked code-shell is a threat.
Today, take notice; time is getting shorter.
Two speckled eggs. Omens from the Lord, or
Nature, the clouds, some darker silhouette.
Listen, my friend: what they say’s an order.
And at this moment’s close, you’ll cross the border
into the moment after — seems no end
of days lived longly but they’re short and shorter
at each turn, the world speaks: I record her
though she only talks in languages long dead,
there is an order — yes — an awful order
my friend, wake up! Your shadow’s growing shorter.
Danielle Blau
I Am the Perennial Head of This One-Person Subcutaneous Wrecking Crew
To maintain these depths of misery
takes work given my buoyant disposition;
for every sill of my flesh
I must invent a new method to flay.
Few people know inside your skin
is a microscopic garden.
With love I tuck in seeds
of its destruction late
each night, daily tend my
dear ruin — knot distant, unsuspecting
clovers at their root tips; stomata full of
rodent bones, down
they go, the pond lilies: I’m strict. Who
could love you like you.
Danielle Blau