The Disappearing Theatre
Her book, The Disappearing Theatre, was chosen for the 2015 Poets at Work Prize, selected by Stephen Dunn, and will debut in January 2016. Of the book, poet James Richardson writes:
"Theatres, dioramas, boxes within boxes, rooms within rooms within rooms, Heather Altfeld's work has a mysterious largeness of feeling and, instant by instant, the fascination of the miniature. It's her microscopy that you notice first – the unpredictable strangeness, the vivid and surprising rightness of the detail. The poems are like museums whose fascinating objects take you left right, left, left, till you're not quite sure where the exit is going to be. You could love them for this luxurious unlikeliness alone as, little by little, they draw you further in, and back in time, and – so often literally – further down, into an element denser than our own, the fever of memory, the breathable water of dream. This poet brings us depths of trouble and wonder, and bears them for us. Surfacing, she is like her Houdini, miraculously freed, standing pained and wiser in the little pool of her chains."