Figures of Speech

Meryl Phair’s Figures of Speech is a love letter to language and all its playful possibilities. Each poem in this energetic collection is a puzzle to solve, a riddle to unravel, a labyrinth to find a path through. Here, the parts are often greater than their sum—but this is because of the power she imparts to all the clicking gears and switches of words, sentences, and sounds. She lifts the hatch on the clockwork mechanism of typography and dares us to look inside—at the spaces between letters, at the words folded within other words. Then she lights a fuse and lets it explode over the page into new shapes and patterns and ideas. In Figures of Speech, words and letters and punctuation become tangible objects with which the poet can play and experiment. These poems are full of movement and wonder, sculpting text into visual art.