poet : ceremonialist : professor

books
A L I B R A R Y O F L I G H T
now available for pre-order
forthcoming Feb 2024

Danielle Vogel is an alchemist of language, time, and the body. Reading A Library of Light, I almost expected my thoughts to materialize in front of me. What a strange, intense pleasure it is to feel the categories dissolving, to be allowed to accompany Vogel in her journey 'through the door of [her] mother's body' and into all the light she both finds and makes beyond.
- Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book
When poet Danielle Vogel began writing meditations on the syntax of earthen and astral light, she had no idea that her mother's tragic death would eclipse the writing of that book, turning her attention to grief's syntax and quiet fields of cellular light in the form of memory. Written in elegant, crystalline prose poems, A Library of Light is a memoir that begins and ends in an incantatory space, one in which light speaks. At the book's center glows a more localized light: the voice of the poet as she reflects, with ceremonial patience, on the bioluminescence of the human body, language's relationship to lineage, her mother's journals written during years of estrangement from her daughter, and the healing potential of poetry. A mesmerizing elegy infused with studies of epigenetic theory and biophotonics, A Library of Light shows that to language is to take part in transmission, transmutation of energy, and sonic (re)patterning of biological light.
ISBN: 9780819500922
112 pages
February 6, 2024
Wesleyan University Press

Vogel gifts us the body of the book and the carefully woven nest as twinned shelters—stays against our own ephemerality. Her lyrical meditations plait the threads of body and language into a beautiful 'architecture for that secret unsayable center.'
- Amaranth Borsuk, author of The Book
EDGES & FRAY is an embodied meditation on the ways we build and inhabit language. Interweaving close observation of the material composition of birds' nests with a delicate examination of what it means to be a writer and a reader, Danielle Vogel attunes us to the hardly noticed but fundamental threads by which we entangle ourselves into the world. The frayed edges of consciousness are carefully arranged to open and respond to the presence of others, to shift and rearrange with every reading. Experimental and deeply grounded, this work is lyrical and patient. The text creates overlapping ecological fields, wherein each field is a system always in a state of becoming. Edges & Fray is personal without feeling private, experimental without feeling programmatic. Its construction is intuitive and masterful, its many threads interwoven and intrinsically linked. This is a beautiful and inspiring book at the intersection of poetry, somatics, ecology, and divination.
ISBN: 978-8081957925
112 pages
January 7, 2020
Wesleyan University Press

ISBN: 978-1597098212
80 pages
June 30, 2020
Red Hen Press
In Danielle Vogel’s heartbreakingly gorgeous The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity, she digs underneath the skin of the body, language, and the book, to scratch toward a haunting absence. To tend to and hold that absence—to stroke it—requires Vogel’s patient yet urgent series of utterances. A vibrational pull that won’t let us go results, a crackling cry in the ache of night, a sensate break into another sphere, a lit passion, a new blues. Yes to these poems’ redemptive resilience, their fracture and their blur. Yes, yes, yes. I am reminded of why we need poetry.
- Dawn Lundy Martin, author of Good Stock Strange Blood
Danielle Vogel's newest collection creates a latticework for repair—the repairing of past trauma, the calling-into-presence of a dissociated self—but does so while keeping the material of this net of thinking in a fragmented, diaphanous state, glowing in the space between the poem and essay. Across three sections of "displacements," "miniatures," and "volume," Vogel initiates readers into the séance of the book; she asks the reader to hold vigil for the most crucial phase of its composition, which can only happen when the reader and she meet at the site of the page, within a "new, interrupted unity." In The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity, accord--writing with, reading with--is always a verb, always kinetic, alchemical, and alive. "It only takes one letter on the page," Vogel writes, "and we are already inside one another's lungs." To consent to walk through these spaces is to give up that part of you that wishes to remain anonymous and un-entrained. You will be grateful that you did.