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


In transplanting her painterly European sensibility into an American poetic context, Alta Ifland creates and redreams the hauntingly surreal emotional landscapes of dislocation, desolate distances, and Redonesque disjuncture from which she shapes these ever-shifting, mad-and-mythic excursions—in voices awed, childlike, sardonic, she startles and disturbs, charms and exalts. —Wanda Coleman