These poems are in some sense unimaginable. They seem inscribed with a strange light as if at a weird angle. This is the real world, dingy, backlit and heartbreaking, and it is also a world where words can cut the world in half and give it back to itself but rarefied this time, now uneasy and beautiful and strange. You have never read poems that work like these, in their internal architecture and it’s breaking, between private and public, between world and… something else; Stevens and Oppen would weep— Straw writes 'and if you write the poem you kindly / here or cruelly there can trace / the shadows of the netting / as it falls on people, animals, and things. This is exactly what they do in this work, with a skillful ear, care, and brilliance.

Timmy Straw’s poems, essays, and translations appear in Yale Review, Jacket2, Paris Review, Annulet, Chicago Review, and elsewhere, and their work has been supported by a Fulbright research fellowship to Moscow, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, and a Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Iowa. A graduate student in Comp Lit at Penn, they are also working on translations of the contemporary Russian poet Grigori Dashevsky.