“In combinations of ekphrasis, meditation, and imaginative play, White opens his poetic field to the typographical sign. As a Diné of the Naaneesht’ézhi Tábaahí, he initiates a poetic trajectory in this, his second remarkable book, that cuts across the roots of what we call American culture when, for instance, he asks ‘how does a letter become another when its origin ... Read moreis lost?’ LETTERRS is his complex ars poetica, a book of love poems to the grapheme and ‘its outbreak of silence.’ But it is also a provocative and systemic reorientation of language toward ritual, toward ‘bone-shaped artifacts,’ and the ‘notochord of thought.’ In LETTERRS, Orlando White situates the word at the unsettled beginning of human dialogue with the world.”—Forrest Gander Show Less