PRE-

Poetry. Barbara Tomash's PRE- reawakens her reader to the marvel of language, the common currency of encounter, media, negotiation, courtship. Collecting, collating, collaging the manifold threads spawned by the action of prefixes, the poet [fixes] in the memory language's capacity to wander, meanings folding outward and inward upon themselves, feral and profuse--a piece of fruit coated and preserved in sugar: a slower oxidation as in the body: because of startling or unexpected moving over a field. As the weedy history of language loosens, Tomash deftly traverses the interior spaces of words, unstitching the tissue connecting one word to another and weaving it afresh. Relentlessly inventive, PRE- sets the reader loose, reveling in the whole made new.

Barbara Tomash's terrific new book PRE- reminds of us Emerson's great notion that every word was once a poem. Here, not just every word, but every part of each word, in particular, the prefix, where we begin and begin. Deftly, brilliantly, with her characteristic wit, intelligence, and adventurous imagination, Barbara Tomash opens up the word and the world in these poems.--Gillian Conoley