spuytenduyvil

... thilleman toys with the ratio of thought and sensation, tweaking our ration page by page to make sure the whole creative process (the branching of our entire neural net) is engaged in incubation, illumination, and verification. This book activates what scientists Menon and Bressler call “dynamic interactions of distributed brain areas operating in large-scale networks.”

                                       Lori Anderson Moseman, from the introduction

With formal deftness and intellectual brio, T. Thilleman’s poems work the magic of the spell-maker engaged in patterns of meaning that exceed the properties of any single language or discourse.  In a rush of writing that invokes Hindu, Greek and Egyptian figures, Thilleman’s meditations on Eros and constructions of the Beloved seek the consolations and incitements of “Nuit,” both alembic gift-bearer and soul’s companion.  In so doing, the poems trace a Dionysian ritual of ekstasis (standing outside of oneself) and sparagmos (the tearing apart of a living creature), bearing within them the unfolding disturbance of experiences that incorporate the dream-like and incorporeal seen through the eyes of a ludic wanderer.  Thilleman’s great accomplishment in this work is to set before us again the fault lines of identity, as he enacts—artfully, perceptually, ardently—a Deleuzian folding of One into Other, of I into You, in poetry written under the sign of she who “persists in activations to sound / voice-box of angelic things.”

     Andrew Mossin, author of The Veil and Exile’s Recital