Natasha Tiniacos’s writing consists of a tight knitting of words that refer to a gamut of sensations, ideas, objects; such a knitting is the only possible way to approach the solidity, the concreteness of the experience she wants to incarnate in her poems. Hence, the disparity of registers, the sudden changes of tone, the unruly grammar that at times takes possession of her language. Hunger, touch, deprivation, mother, longing, love, body, house, immersion, solitude, image, remembrance, are sewn in these texts through a subtle, almost invisible thread that forces us readers, in a constant challenge to intelligibility, to move back and forth between the tangibility of things and the ineffability of passion, of suffering, of homelessness, preventing us from settling for the 'narrative,' the 'story' in order to remain in the tense space of words that neither explain nor trivialize their complex interrelation. Against both the 'regime of the body' and the 'regime of the fluent,' Tiniacos’s poetry is a singular example of writing itself becoming (the) experience.

'If we are made of dust, / it is the dust that is left after the stampede.' I feel unshaped by these lines in a way I would like to remember for a long time. In the spirit of being direct, like many of these poems are, this collection and their colloquial translations shattered me, I who did not know I was glass. This book is for the soft animal inside, the one who grieves and the one who survives.