With its measured and continual revelation, Felicia Zamora has crafted a work that celebrates form as human evolution?the poem?s breath, the poet?s body?passing over time in a landscape thirsty for passage. In Of Form & Gather, poems become choral assemblages to their proximity, tuned into the maker?s spirit as coiled out from unhurried interactions with ancestral zygotes. Where does identity invoke place over silence?intimate implications of nuance, trust in the reader?s ability to move in concert with the writer?s soul? If even a fraction of beyond-space is gleaned by possibility, the maker?s job is done. If one could imagine what awaits between where one could go and why one has remained, would that bring us to a finite completion?a cyclic undercarriage of removal in the language remaining? Zamora?s reminder is to affect each part of the poem by implementing a profoundly gentle humanity that connects to the shifting external across borders, continuously returning to invention with a charge to the ?think,? a dare to the heart, that allows movement in the ubiquity of silence. In a sort of volcanic empathy with spirits invoked by the sling of creation across centuries borrowed and replanted. A poem?s burden is to live inside its creation, where the organized singularity of its gathering is what brings the reader to the reader?s own voice. We are a culture redefined when we step into the culture that defines us?to expose its incomparable reach with the breath that moves us, with our body?s volumetric rhythms shifting among our human matter. To own that geo-shift, to bring about other as in, to affect change by knowing that change needs to happen beneath layers of cognition, underneath our organized paradigms.

This is quietly revolutionary work that throws a gauntlet to the social diaspora. A living palimpsest to newly awaken our social engagement by breathing in a simultaneity of opposing forces?as tectonic plates of hearing that create fissures inside the unfolding kinetic. If my job is to shepherd the reader through new terrain, let me introduce you to the lungs between the lines?the breathing of an object formed as one continuous vertebration?page to page, word to other. My obligation is to get out of my own way, to allow the work in its bio-syntactic intensity to speak quietly, without introduction or promise. So I?ll leave you with this: the ability to chart your course through your own questions is a human trait that you have the obligation to nurture. To wondrously allow your capacity for travel and enlarge your perception of a world continuously expanding, in whatever direction you choose. Read this work, look about you, and take a breath. We don?t often have moments that bore deep and give back.

Thank-you, Felicia, for giving us that opening. (Excerpted from Introduction).