A Table that Goes on for Miles

Poetry. Heim's poems are treasurehouses of carved thought: she is actually thinking, word by word, line by line, and her argument's currents seem to etch patterns in the syntax, like wall carvings made by a delicate and ethical hand. Everything here is transparency, lightnessilluminations sifted through a mind willing to be unsettled by experience's injurious data. Reading these phenomenal and profoundly philosophical poems, I think of still lives by Giorgio Morandicareful, enigmatic arrangements of the ordinary. Heim's acoustic elegance places her in the front ranks of those who pursue the plainspoken sublime. Wayne Koestenbaum