A collection of lyric meditations cultivated from a deeply personal experience of the natural world, synthesizing the poet's experiences of the elemental and ephemeral; presence and place.
In Of Mineral, Tiff Dressen initiates a chemical reaction, taking place on the page so meaning is continually created and destroyed. The forces at play create a beautiful and unpredictable stability. With intentionality and deep attention, the poet undergoes an elemental education, learning through articulation how to experience the natural world as an active participant rather than as an observer. As the poet attempts to synchronize their left and right brain, boundaries between the urban and the wild dissolve to form a more unified experience of presence.
Tiff Dressen's first book of poems Songs from the Astral Bestiary was published by lyric& Press, 2014. In 2019, they played the role of Earl of Kent in a production of King Lear. They enjoy urban flaneuring, their felines, and setting type and printing at the San Francisco Center for the Book.
Title: Of Mineral
Author: Dressen, Tiff
ISBN: 9781643621418
Binding:
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: 2022-06-02
Number of Pages: 80
Weight: 0.0900 kg
Tiff Dressen's poems are bold acts of accumulation and dispersal. The result makes for hybrids and synergies and possibly even 'a new structure for love.' The readiness to attend is everywhere-these texts are stays against forgetfulness, and a summons to maintain the exquisite tensions of a lifeworld in which 'we are all responders.' -George Albon
Tiff Dressen sets type, and these poems feel like they have been laid down on the page by such a person: with physical precision, silence and serif equally weighted. These are such lyrics that live in a physical world: that know the difference between branch and bird-bone, the qualities of each that permits balance. The collection of them together feels as intentional as construction inside a Cornell Box, as evocative as an early Mondrian. -Kazim Ali
Tiff Dressen's Of Mineral engages city life as it unfolds in an ever changing landscape of flora and human connection utilizing navigation and inquiry to thread the labyrinth, 'we were denied the original / forest that grew here.' 'How do I / create the distance / you need / to reach across.' Dressen's compact collection provokes existential thought while acting as a guide to recognize what is possible-'Because you said the sky / is a kind of ocean / we learned the alchemy / of air / we became many.' Take this book with you on a hike. Read it on a hilltop. -Sunnylyn Thibodeaux
While Tiff Dressen's Of Mineral certainly vibrates with concision and crystalline sharpness, the minerality of their book also pulses animal-skeletal structure and blood pumping warmth, vulnerability, refusal, and all sorts of gorgeous entanglement. An embodied exploration of place and how the city calls us into being and intimate relation: 'How do I/ create the distance/ you need/ to reach across?' Dressen has made a world amongst these pages that is both the world we share daily and somewhere else entirely; a visit there will transform your own inhabitance in beautiful and unexpected ways. -Megan Kaminski
There is an intimacy and an urgency to Dressen's lyrics, as lines and fragments meander across the landscape and days. Dressen's extended lyrics find their roots in the slant language of their immediate world, and amid the examples of foundational poets. -rob mclennan's blog
