poet : ceremonialist
Vogel is doing
semiotic soulwork...
-Carmen Giménez
Danielle Vogel is a poet, lyric essayist, and interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of queer ecology, somatics, and ceremony.
Her poetry collections include The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity (Red Hen 2020), Edges & Fray (Wesleyan 2020), and Between Grammars (Noemi 2015).
Her work also appears in anthologies including, The Book: 101 Definitions, edited by Amaranth Borsuk (Anteism 2021), A Forest on Many Stems (Nightboat 2021), edited by Laynie Brown, and Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan 2018), edited by Linda Russo and Marthe Reed.
a book , of string and filament -- /
a vibrational object upon contact
- from Edges & Fray, 2020
p o e t i c s
Danielle Vogel writes toward a more organic grammar. Always asking how can a book, as an extended field of a body, serve as a site of radical transformation. How can the poem, the fragment, the lyric essay, and even the silences between sounds serve as non-linear conduits for transmuting the body and its consciousness?
Her embodied, ceremonial research practice, which includes the study of animal architectures, land and sea restoration, plant communication, the science of biophotons and epigenetic theory, and also encompasses aspects of her art-making, such as collaborating with wild clay, plants, waters and pigments, reflects her ongoing commitment to interspecies healing, bioregional literacy (learning from the languages of elements and ecosystems), reintegrating a reader with their environments, and allowing this ongoing and developing practice to directly inform and reshape her poetics across projects, devotions, and books.
Vogel is at work on the final edits of her forthcoming lyric memoir, A Library of Light, which attempts to translate—and reorganize toward healing—epigenetic memory or the hidden and intelligent field of light that lives at the microscopic levels of her nervous system and DNA. She brings this investigation to the page through a blending of incantation, lyric, documentary, and elegiac forms.
Vogel's current projects-in-process are particularly concerned with ecopoetics. They seek to weave experimental prose forms with ecological literacy, reparative poem-gardens, geomancy, oracular communications, and site-responsive poems, and are tentatively titled Sea Margin: a prophecy in reverse, Water Oracle, and The Frequency of Flowers.
Because "a body loosens itself across an alphabet," because "an absent word unsettl[es] the collarbone’s concavity," because "the vowels layering, breathe," Danielle Vogel’s ravishing and profound work resides in one as a thrilling visceral experience. Never has a reading encounter felt so fully embodied—the vibration and motions and shapes of language inside, transforming the day, long after the book is closed.