Field of Vision

“Field of Vision is an exquisite, strange contemplation of contrasts that feel both universal and deeply American: the California desert, drenched Maine shores; tenderness and violence; dreams and the dreamlike twists of real life. These poems twist perceptions, drawing us in, lulling us in order to surprise us. They remind me that poetry can be an act of rescue, reviving not only language but also the reader.”
—Elisa Gonzalez, author of Grand Tour

“These poems with patient precision intimately describe a world, flower by flower, field by field, sky by sky. They describe not in the way a circle is described, sweeping the circumference, but in the way life is “described,” sweeping, as the eye of a raptor might, across the terrain of this place we live in, called lives, called human, called suffering, called nature, called Earth. And they do that magic thing reserved for poems in all their potency: while they name, they prod at, they palpate, they make room for, they bring into possibility the vibrating shapes of the unnamable.”
—Eleni Sikelianos, author of Your Kingdom

“’I was an abstract memory of an animal,’ writes Stephanie Horvath in Field of Vision, a collection that shape-shifts between the feral and the domestic. In the rural-industrial landscape that Horvath conjures, encounters between proximal, intimate and unknown others brim with anxiety and desire. What is dreamed, traded, recollected or conjured are preoccupations that move this accomplished, closely observed and wondrous debut through the space that surrounds it, unabated yet receding. As Horvath tells us: ‘Something ruptures the earth and its mark endures.”’
—Bhanu Kapil

“It has been said so often that the environmental crisis of our moment is too large to see. And yet poets keep begging to differ. Stephanie Horvath takes lyric’s intimate quietness and expands it with dream logic, so something far too large for a single voice can be held inside one, briefly, without either breaking.”
—Juliana Spahr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ars Poetica