Our Prediction - by Daniel Tiffany (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An intimate archive emptied and overwritten by a fear of words, a book of mingled fates

The poems of Our Prediction are lifted from a folder of sketchy reports recalling the strange neutrality of the ancient chorus. And this intimate archive exposes a fear of language concealed at the root of poetry, delivering a book in which doubt, shame, and dread overtake poetry's stereotypical love affair with words, a book that crosses over into the exclusion zone of stupidity and never returns.

Breeding and scavenging without scruple or restraint, the "bare life" of these unauthorized poems invariably confuses reading and writing. Listening becomes the business of speaking, of saying we but not asking who. And in its crooked way, the crooked text may begin to sound like a campfire oath of senseless plots and garbled refrains. For the listener soon will be surrounded by an accident of voices--a cassandrian short cut--exposing the particulars of not-yet-being.

Review Quotes

"If only things didn't happen / to us forever," Daniel Tiffany writes in Our Prediction, and these poems testify beautifully both to that longing for a final separateness from which to observe life, and the equally powerful longing to record one's entanglement with life. As in all the best books, here the timeless is wedged into time, and made new thereby.---Shane McCrae, author of Two Appearances After the Resurrection

Our Prediction reaches back through the past and down our collective throats to deliver a terrifying and tender new tongue. Perverse and hallucinatory, language in these poems sounds off an erotic charge, haywiring us with shady intelligence and unsettling humor. Even if you know Tiffany's work, you will still be blown away by this astonishing book--his best yet!---Christine Hume, author of Saturation Project

Daniel Tiffany's Our Prediction assembles a collective voice that seems to arise from a polis at the edge of history. Lines jostle for position like the members of a restless, uprooted population. A profane sublimity flickers in these samples from an impossible, yet all too real quotidian. Whatever fate holds in store for humanity, the plural voice in these poems unsettlingly anticipates its outlines.---Andrew Joron, author of The Absolute Letter

About the Author

DANIEL TIFFANY is the author of collections of poetry from presses including Wesleyan, Action Books, Noemi, Tinfish, Parlor Press, and Omnidawn, His poems have been published in many journals, including Poetry, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, Bomb, and Paris Review. In addition to his own writing, he has published translations of texts from French, Greek, and Italian. Tiffany is also the author of five volumes of academic criticism from presses including Harvard, Chicago, and Johns Hopkins. His entry on "Lyric Poetry and Poetics" can be found in the current edition of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature, and he is a recipient of the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. www.danieltiffany.com