Diane Thiel

Diane Thiel is the author of eleven books of poetry and nonfiction, including Echolocations and Resistance Fantasies. Thiel’s work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Hopkins Review, and numerous other publications. Her awards include a PEN Award, the Nicholas Roerich Prize, and a Fulbright. Thiel received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Brown University and has traveled and lived in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia, working on literary and environmental projects. She is Regents’ Professor of English and Associate Chair at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and lives in the Sandia Mountain foothills.


All Books

Questions from Outer Space

Diane Thiel

Publication Date: May 24, 2022

$16.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 9781636280271

Description:

Compelling poems with brave, insightful, often humorous observations of the world.

Diane Thiel’s eagerly anticipated collection of poems, Questions from Outer Space, explores fresh and often humorous perspectives that capture the surreal quality of our swiftly changing lives on this planet. The poems travel through questions on many fronts, challenging assumptions and locating unique angles of perception. This thought-provoking book reflects a deep engagement with the natural world, a questioning of our built systems, the expansive wilderness of parenting, and the complexities of navigating outer and inner space.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Diane Thiel is a poet of unusual worldliness, capable of bringing biology, anthropology, and global travel to the mix. This is a strong new collection from a poet who has been expanding her vision and refining her art: ‘The seahorse in the brain / appears to be in charge / of memory and navigation.’ The objectivity of science mixed with a human concern for how we find our way. These are field notes from ‘the edge of reason,’ poems of intelligence and concern. Questions from Outer Space is a book tuned to deep experience of life on earth, marking the welcome return of a first-rate poet.”
—David Mason, author of The Sound: New and Selected Poems

“Diane Thiel is the real thing—a genuinely memorable lyric poet whose intuitive music strikes the difficult balance between the mythic and the real, the personal and the historical, the familiar and the unknown.”
—Dana Gioia, poet, critic, and American Book Award winner

News

Diane Thiel interviewed for DailyLobo.com!

In a digital age, classic romantic gestures can go a long way, especially during the month of love. Two University of New Mexico creative writing professors sat down with the Daily Lobo to share tips with readers on why and how to write the perfect love letter. Diane Thiel has been teaching creative writing at UNM for […]

Reviews

Brown Alumni Magazine reviews Diane Thiel’s QUESTIONS FROM OUTER SPACE!

Thiel’s third full-length poetry collection, and her twelfth book, arrives bristling with navigable strangeness and open-ended questions. The 67 sometimes otherworldly poems here weave through biology, parenting, the pandemic, world travel, life on Zoom, growing up in the South, the multiverse, and the fate of the earth, among other subjects.

QUESTIONS FROM OUTER SPACE by Diane Thiel Reviewed in the Florida Review!

Diane Thiel’s third collection of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, comes after an interlude during which the poet devoted her energies to a travel memoir (The White Horse) and the translation of contemporary Greek fiction. Her first two collections (Echolocations and Resistance Fantasies) garnered acclaim, including the Nicholas Roerich Award, for their intelligence, wit, wordplay, and attention to […]

Diane Thiel’s QUESTIONS FROM OUTER SPACE Reviewed on The Line Break!

Diane Thiel is the author of eleven books of poetry, nonfiction, and creative writing pedagogy, and Questions from Outer Space (Red Hen Press, 2022) is her third collection of poems. I purchased this book when I was visiting Asheville, North Carolina, and wandering around a bookstore. I liked the title as I assumed it would reveal poems […]

Diane Thiel’s QUESTIONS FROM OUTER SPACE reviewed by Colorado State University!

Questions From Outer Space is about coming to terms with humanity’s destructive choices and orienting ourselves to life as a result. Diane Thiel’s poems lament our destruction of planet Earth and caution against how technology separates us from one another—yet the book ultimately presents a message of hope. These poems offer the possibility of solace in […]

QUESTIONS FROM OUTER SPACE Reviewed for Delmarva Review!

DIANE THIEL’S WORK has always asked fundamental and human questions. Janet Holmes, reviewing Thiel’s first book, Echolocations, notes that Thiel’s work deals with “silences, evasions, loss, and omissions.” This third poetry book, Questions from Outer Space, still revolves around the unseen and silent, but differently-with a larger lens, an even greater range of form and […]