If fairy tales
and fables can be said to represent the dream life
of our collective psyche, the poems in Alta Ifland’s Voice
of Ice might
be described as the chronicle of what a dream dreams,
an account of a nightmare’s torment. Ifland’s
brilliant collection of prose poems documents the quest
for a coherent self, an authentic identity born out of
the chaos of language and history. Her poems trace a
radical process of de-creation—dismemberment of
the body, dissolution of the ego, abandonment of the
self—and the reinvention of a new identity, purified
by the acid of tears. This new creation—tentative
and rarified, “a child’s body of light”—earns
a tenuous existence, but it proves to be enough to withstand
the omnipresent threat of oblivion. from Gary Young's introduction
