“This is my messenger through enemy lines, carrier pigeon, pecking out and in again.”  In this series of dialogues with—and riffs on—the lines of her poetic precursors (Plath, Rich, Ashbery, Turcotte, Bunting, and others), Nava Fader navigates the bloodstream of poetry past and fixates on rediscovering the red cells, the flesh-made words, amidst the white noise.  Yet ultimately these linguistic jewels pasted onto the ribcages of Fader's own poetic forms catch lightning and crackle with their own life, break skeletons into keys to unlock the doors into audience with a fragile higher power (“hold your breath past all the names/and make a wish”).  The results are broken confections in Romantic lyric's garb—chaotic, powerful, and unapologetic.   

—Bruce Covey

Nava Fader's work compresses –––– ricochets –––– roots –––– and occurs in real time.   These poems are as concerned with language-ways as immediate experience as flickering media.   Both generous and demanding, sprung and coiled, these poems are necessary utterance.

—Mike Sikkema

Written as wovens by Nava Fader the elementals, magic, earth, air, fire and water are here collaborators in constellation with the elements of Adrienne Rich and Rimbaud. Her pure lines are a strong heart's beat and each instant in the writing is a cocktail of the sensual and the spell, that realm where poetry embraces this place as the poem in nuptials. I am so embraced and I enter the estate of love.

—Michael Basinski

 

 

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Nava Fader received her master's in Poetics from SUNY Buffalo, writing her thesis on Adrienne Rich.   She is the author of two chapbooks: Stonesoup (Slack Buddha, 2009), and The Plath Poems (Dancing Girl, 2009). Most of her poems begin with a line by somebody else.   She is a school librarian in Buffalo.