The Novice Insomniac

Book excerpt: The Novice Insomniac is a book of initiations and elegies wherein language becomes a sanctuary and remembrance a way of staving off oblivion. This is a brave and healing collection. --Edward HirschEmily Warn is our sleepless eremite. Her poetry situates and enlivens particular facts in a vision of creation. That makes her, I suppose, a religious poet, but she is also a poet of love and desire, mature in her account of personal pain and responsible in her account of the pain of the collective. Her simplest statements have the force of complex recognitions. --W.S. Di Piero.