Compelling poems with brave, insightful, often humorous observations of the world.
“Diane Thiel is a poet of unusual worldliness, capable of bringing biology, anthropology, and global travel to the mix. This is a strong new collection from a poet who has been expanding her vision and refining her art: ‘The seahorse in the brain / appears to be in charge / of memory and navigation.’ The objectivity of science mixed with a human concern for how we find our way. These are field notes from ‘the edge of reason,’ poems of intelligence and concern. Questions from Outer Space is a book tuned to deep experience of life on earth, marking the welcome return of a first-rate poet.”
—David Mason, author of The Sound: New and Selected Poems
“Diane Thiel is the real thing—a genuinely memorable lyric poet whose intuitive music strikes the difficult balance between the mythic and the real, the personal and the historical, the familiar and the unknown.”
—Dana Gioia, poet, critic, and American Book Award winner
Diane Thiel’s Questions from Outer Space is a deft, accomplished collection, honed and fluent, that takes us on multiple journeys through known and unknown territories, locations traveled and imagined. We join her philosophical investigations of the multiverse, “a different way / of making sense,” and accompany her on earthly journeys through La Paz, Bolivia; Veria, Greece; the complications and rewards of parenting; the mutability of memory. A curiosity and openness to experience throughout teach the poet, and us, of the paradox she explores: a love of both “belonging // to [the] world, while also being alien to it,” via questions, and geographies, that always amplify an appreciation of Thiel’s various and richly traveled galaxies.
—Adrianne Kalfopoulou, author of A History of Too Much
Questions from Outer Space reinvigorates the world of the everyday, a world we think we know until we read Diane Thiel. She not only makes it strange and makes it new, she wants us to reinvest in a sensuous world replete with complex thoughts and experiences. Her poems display complexity of form, are allegorical, narrative, metaphorical, psychological, political, and advocate on behalf of the natural world. She offers subtle critiques of the machine and digital age for their impersonality and for mounting assaults on nature. Diane Thiel subverts our conventional impulses—, mostly blind ones—, into an awareness that a sacred poetics informs our secular lives.
—Fred D’Aguiar, author of Year of Plagues
