<DIV><p>“Emily Warn is one tough poet. . . . She not only takes on God but also juggles the hot coals of memory and wrestles her way to an honest spiritual life.”—<I>The Seattle Times</I></p><p>"Warn has created a serious meditation on Jewish prayer and cosmogony, in lyrical prose and in accessible verse, a book that belongs not only on poetry shelves, but amid other Judaica and books of prose and verse on religious themes." —<I>Publishers Weekly</I></p><p>"...a sincere exploration of spirituality and the line between the abstract and the concrete..." —<I>Library Journal</I></p><p>How are words made, and how do they derive power? These are the questions at the core of Emily Warn’s <I>Shadow Architect</I>, 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. <I>Shadow Architect</I> 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.</p><p>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.”</p><p><I>To invent the alef-beit,<br>decipher the grammar of crows,<br>read a tangle of bare branches<BR>with vowels of the last leaves<BR>scrawling their jittery speech<BR>on the sky’s pale page.</I></p><p><B>Emily Warn</B>, author of two previous books of poetry, lives in Seattle and Chicago, where she is the editor of the Poetry Foundation’s website.</p></DIV>