Questions from Outer Space

Diane Thiel is the author of eleven books of poetry and nonfiction, including Echolocations and Resistance Fantasies. Thiel's work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Hopkins Review, and numerous other publications. Her awards include a PEN Award, the Nicholas Roerich Prize, and a Fulbright. Thiel received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Brown University and has traveled and lived in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia, working on literary and environmental projects. She is Regents' Professor of English and Associate Chair at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and lives in the Sandia Mountain foothills.

“Diane Thiel is a poet of unusual worldliness, capable of bringing biology, anthropology, and global travel to the mix. This is a strong new collection from a poet who has been expanding her vision and refining her art: ‘The seahorse in the brain / appears to be in charge / of memory and navigation.’ The objectivity of science mixed with a human concern for how we find our way. These are field notes from ‘the edge of reason,’ poems of intelligence and concern. Questions from Outer Space is a book tuned to deep experience of life on earth, marking the welcome return of a first-rate poet.” —David Mason, author of The Sound: New and Selected Poems“Diane Thiel is the real thing—a genuinely memorable lyric poet whose intuitive music strikes the difficult balance between the mythic and the real, the personal and the historical, the familiar and the unknown.” —Dana Gioia, poet, critic, and American Book Award winner"Diane Thiel’s Questions from Outer Space is a deft, accomplished collection, honed and fluent, that takes us on multiple journeys through known and unknown territories, locations traveled and imagined. We join her philosophical investigations of the multiverse, 'a different way / of making sense,' and accompany her on earthly journeys through La Paz, Bolivia; Veria, Greece; the complications and rewards of parenting; the mutability of memory. A curiosity and openness to experience throughout teach the poet, and us, of the paradox she explores: a love of both 'belonging // to [the] world, while also being alien to it,' via questions, and geographies, that always amplify an appreciation of Thiel’s various and richly traveled galaxies." —Adrianne Kalfopoulou, author of A History of Too Much"Questions from Outer Space reinvigorates the world of the everyday, a world we think we know until we read Diane Thiel. She not only makes it strange and makes it new, she wants us to reinvest in a sensuous world replete with complex thoughts and experiences. Her poems display complexity of form, are allegorical, narrative, metaphorical, psychological, political, and advocate on behalf of the natural world. She offers subtle critiques of the machine and digital age for their impersonality and for mounting assaults on nature. Diane Thiel subverts our conventional impulses—, mostly blind ones—, into an awareness that a sacred poetics informs our secular lives."—Fred D’Aguiar, author of Year of Plagues"Diane Thiel’s poems lament our destruction of planet Earth and caution against how technology separates us from one another—yet the book ultimately presents a message of hope. These poems offer the possibility of solace in the natural world: the opportunity to escape our machine-constrained lives through water, woods, and stars." — Ann Amicucci, for Colorado State University"What makes this book truly successful-and beautiful-is that the last two sections, 'The Farthest Side' and 'Time in the Wilderness,' though they seem to move away from the 'Outer Space' and alien of the earlier sections, actually move deeper into it and suggest that the most alien, the most 'other,' is the most ordinary."—Delmarva Review"Thiel’s wry and sometimes whimsical way of looking at the world (a trait readily apparent in her previous volumes) is woven throughout these poems, often making light of, or even mocking, the slippery and careless use of language in social and corporate settings (“KwickAssess”)."— Stephen Bentz, The Florida Review"Thiel's third full-length poetry collection, and her twelfth book, arrives bristling with navigable strangeness and open-ended questions." —Edward Hardy, Brown Alumni Magazine