The Architect of Elsewhere by Donna Wolf-Palacio

In The Architect of Elsewhere, Donna Wolf-Palacio examines strange and familiar liminal spaces and states. Poems build from the elemental to the mythical: “…we watch gold skies / disappear in the landscape.” For everything we can touch and hold in these poems, something slips out of our grip, out of focus. These poems are boats that drift from shoreline to shoreline over a sometimes dangerous river. They are chalk marks on a driveway. As each veil is peeled away, another continues to distort reality: “Deep in this history, / we blend sorrow.” Through the poems of The Architect of Elsewhere, Donna Wolf-Palacio asks question after question that can only be answered by elemental, animal wisdom.

–Courtney Bambrick, Poetry Editor, Philadelphia Stories

In The Architect of Elsewhere, a steady speaker guides the reader through that which is unknowable, but infinitely ripe for contemplation. To read this collection is to get nearly lost in a gorgeous landscape, with a rope in hand as through-line. “The voice inside lives its own still life, always ready, like a waterfall,” writes Wolf-Palacio. The beauty and strangeness of nature, the consideration of paths taken and not taken, all are evoked with a voice that rises to the surface, sure of its mysterious wisdom. “[I]t’s what keeps you here,” says the poet, “what you have fought to know.”

–Aimee Hearon, Poet and teacher

“The Architect of Elsewhere: In an alchemy of Zen and physics, passion and possibilities, Donna Wolf-Palacio takes us out into the universe and back to our own beating hearts.”
–Kathryn Watterson, author of Not by the Sword,Voices of African American Princeton and Women in Prison