"Reading the poems in The Snow Watcher is like breathing cold air.... they are full of sharp observation, both of the world and herself, unsentimental poems with a sinewy intellectual toughness"— The Washington Post The Snow Watcher is a sequence of poems that asks a single obsession what is the self? The book is a radical re-envisioning of what makes us human rather than animal, human rather than insentient. The poems delve into parts of childhood more comfortably forgotten, and into the ancient stillness of the monastery (Twichell is a student of Zen Buddhism). In both realms the known self dissolves, or is intentionally dismantled, and what is left is something impossible to name, though its startling voice can be heard in the austere, near-empty rooms of these poems.
