A collection of poems that explores transformation, dissolution, and renewal—and how language itself can become a site of regeneration.

The poems in Maybe form a tapestry of voices that slip from visibility to invisibility, illusion to disillusion, the conceivable to the inconceivable. Alice Attie writes of boundaries loosening, of transformations and transfigurations born of the unknown and the uncertain. Her poems suggest that this world will dissolve, and it will reappear as something other, something ineffable yet lodged in language, something fraught with an urgency that is both sublime and unbearable. Attie asks from what vantage point can the seer see, the writer write, the listener hear, learning ultimately that “for the length of my years to lengthen, I place the pebble on my tongue and rearrange the boundaries”?

Alice Attie is a poet and a visual artist.  Her artwork, drawings, paintings, and photographs are in many private and public collections, including: The Whitney Museum of American Art, MOMA, The Studio Museum of Harlem, The Museum of the City of New York, The Getty, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Attie graduated from Barnard College with a degree in French literature. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and an MFA in writing. Alice Attie has published four books of poetry with Seagull Books/ University of Chicago Press: These Figures Lining the Hills, Under the Aleppo Sun, Bending into the Light, and Maybe, 2025. Attie’s work often addresses the ethical and aesthetic challenges that take place on the thresholds of the decipherable an the indecipherable, the tangible and the intangible. What lies outside of representation, in the proximity of the unspeakable, is often a force that drives her work. Attie is the recipient of two Pollock-Krasner Grants, in 2015 and in 2024.  She has attended many art residencies including:  The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bellagio, Bogliasco, and Blue Mountain Center.

Doon Arbus is a writer. The author of six non-fiction books, her first novel, The Caretaker, was published by New Directions in 2020, and in French as Le Gardien by Rivages in 2022. The launch of the paperback edition was celebrated in a reading by a chorus of thirteen notable voices at McNally Jackson Seaport in 2023.