“Prose? Prose poetry? Organic form? One need only read a page or two to recognize a voice of such originality, such tenderness and compassion, that all the labels are pared away. Fractal Shores is a magnificent achievement, a book to return to when the soul feels small.”
- Sherod Santos, author of The Square Inch Hours and The Pilot Star Elegies

“Luminous, brilliant and wise, Diane Louie’s poems seem held in a space poised somewhere between secular prayer and Zen Koan, minutely detailed in their often scientific observations and yet quietly enacted as gorgeous vignettes of consciousness. Again and again, Fractal Shores exposes the often failed science of individual human hopes set against the backdrop of geological time. This is an astonishing collection.”
- David St John, author of The Last Troubadour and Study for the World’s Body

“Golden, transfixing. Moving and kaleidoscopic. As insightful as it is gorgeous.”
- David Eagleman, neuroscientist Stanford University, author of Incognito and creator of the PBS documentary series The Brain: The Story of You

“In Fractal Shores, Diane Louie inscribes the phrases that Stevens’ ghosts would return to Earth to hear read from “the great blue tabulae. . .the poem of life.” In these compelling and original poems, the history of the world is the history of any moment–”that sudden blue alighting”: the words or gestures of a mother, father, or lover, a bluebird in the “bare black winter branches.” “We are,” Louie writes, “what we left behind,” and “There is no word for going toward what’s left behind.” But in these poems, words vibrate and ricochet until they fracture and replicate exponentially. They fill, as Stevens says, our ‘spended hearts.’”
- Angie Estes, author of Tryst and Paroles

“Exquisitely written–line by line and word by word. Brilliantly observed and fully inhabited (an entire life comes into view). Beautifully organized in order to investigate a very specific question: how, in the absence of any non-fractal shore, can anyone even attempt to pull into harbor? This deeply serious book is about nothing less.”
- David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto and writer/director of the documentary film Lynch: A History

Read Poems

-“In Any Given Direction”

-“Flying Colors”

-“Visiting Gertrude Stein In Père Lachaise”

Interviews

-Fiction/Non/Fiction [conversation with Whitney Terrell and V.V.Ganeshananthan - 14 July 2022]

-The Hive Poetry Collective [interviewed by Farnaz Fatemi for The Buzz – 13 October 2020]

-with Nidia Hernandez [2020]

Events

-Miami Book Fair [conversation with Sherod Santos – 19 November 2020]