Archipelago

Archipelago is a pilgrimage into the origins of language, a single poem at once descent and flight, where words are wings or gates: organs, entrances, questioned so as to be permitted by hidden meanings into hidden lands. Drawing from the collagist’s art of Robert Duncan and the composition by field of Charles Olson, Alana Siegel approaches the poem as world-making, weaving and challenging the discourses of philosophy, history, science, and religion-with poetry as primary. Through the material of dreams, etymologies, immediacies of the phenomenal-works of artists, poets, mystics, past and present-Siegel recovers lost knowledge so as to re-hear the poem-as-epic not in length but feeling: a cry from beyond and inside the heart of time.

Alana Siegel was born in Los Angeles in 1985. Archipelago is her first full-length book of poetry. Her chapbooks include The Occupations, Semata, and Words from Ra Ra Junction. She presently lives in Berkeley, California, collaborating at the burgeoning Bay Area Public School