Our Prediction
This book can be opened with
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.
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
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
"If only things didn’t happen / to us forever,” Daniel Tiffany writes in Our Prediction, and these poems
—Shane McCrae
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.
