Our Prediction

DANIEL TIFFANY is the author of collections of poetry from presses including Wesleyan, Action Books, Noemi, Tinfish, Parlor Press, and Omnidawn. His poems have been published in many journals, including Poetry, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, Bomb, and Paris Review. In addition to his own writing, he has published translations of texts from French, Greek, and Italian. Tiffany is also the author of five volumes of academic criticism from presses including Harvard, Chicago, and Johns Hopkins. His entry on "Lyric Poetry and Poetics" can be found in the current edition of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature, and he is a recipient of the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. www.danieltiffany.com

• We 1Once all pillows 3If to grow less 4Facing home 6Why are we not deceived 8If the world is a mistake 10Who might as well 11No we do 12You can run 13With all there is 15To come back to 16We can think exactly how 17That’s not us 18Our hatred of antitheses 2021They turn not 22Why have they thought 23Together with 25One by one 26You’ll be surprised 27It crossed our path 28But it’s the other way 30Pig 32As long as the extremities 33We call carelessly 35If the old abuses 37Which in a way 39Nobody knows 40Had something not been 4243Someone has been staring 44A thread by which it wants 45This can’t be 46How have we lost 48It really does 49Story of the crevice 50Who spends an hour 5153The cat is playing with 54Drinks on the table 56We like what we have not prepared 58Even not there much 59That they would count 61Always before afraid of 62Normally we can’t 63They find they 6566We say this evening 67Too much of too little 68Since one can so 70We have been thought 71Saved some 73

"Daniel Tiffany’s Our Prediction assembles a collective voice that seems to arise from a polis at the edge of history. Lines jostle for position like the members of a restless, uprooted population. A profane sublimity flickers in these samples from an impossible, yet all too real quotidian. Whatever fate holds in store for humanity, the plural voice in these poems unsettlingly anticipates its outlines." - Andrew Joron, author of The Absolute Letter "Our Prediction reaches back through the past and down our collective throats to deliver a terrifying and tender new tongue. Perverse and hallucinatory, language in these poems sounds off an erotic charge, haywiring us with shady intelligence and unsettling humor. Even if you know Tiffany’s work, you will still be blown away by this astonishing book – his best yet!" - Christine Hume, author of Saturation Project "If only things didn’t happen / to us forever," Daniel Tiffany writes in Our Prediction, and these poems testify beautifully both to that longing for a final separateness from which to observe life, and the equally powerful longing to record one’s entanglement with life. As in all the best books, here the timeless is wedged into time, and made new thereby." - Shane McCrae, author of Two Appearances After the Resurrection