Steffi Drewes is a poet and editor whose work brings sound, bodily image, performance, improvisation, fashion, city space, and unstable lyric logic into close relation. Her book Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow was published by Kelsey Street Press in 2016. Her poems have appeared in journals including Bennington Review, New American Writing, Phoebe, Fourteen Hills, and MAKE. Recent projects include Count Like It Calms You and the chapbook manuscript Shadow Syndrome, a semifinalist for the 2022 Black River Chapbook Competition.
Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow
The title Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow joins two objects defined by opposing kinds of motion. An anchor holds; an arrow travels. Their repetition creates a field between stillness and direction.
This tension suits Drewes’s poetics. Her poems often move quickly through image and sound while returning to bodily positions, gestures, and objects that give the movement temporary stability.
Sound and improvisation
Drewes’s work is attentive to how words touch through sound. Repeated consonants, internal echoes, abrupt tonal turns, and rhythmic clusters can create continuity across changing images.
Improvisation gives that sonic attention flexibility. A phrase can produce another phrase through resemblance, and an unexpected association can redirect the poem without losing its acoustic momentum.
Lasso New Landmarks: Stitched In Skin
Lasso New Landmarks: Stitched In Skin moves through fashion, bodily gesture, city space, tattoos, visual art, performance, and the social meanings attached to surfaces. The title combines capture, geography, sewing, and skin.
“Lasso” introduces motion and control. “Landmarks” create orientation. “Stitched in skin” turns location into something carried on the body. The poem allows these images to interact through visual and verbal pressure.
Body as surface
Skin is a boundary and a visible field. Clothing covers it, tattoos mark it, weather touches it, and other people read social signs from its presentation.
Drewes uses these qualities to make embodiment part of the poem’s structure. The body becomes a place where private sensation meets public image.
Fashion and performance
Fashion organizes fabric, color, silhouette, gesture, and cultural reference around a body. It creates a visible persona whose meaning changes according to setting and audience.
Performance intensifies that relation. Clothing and posture can become deliberate acts, and the poem can read them as signs within a larger social choreography.
City space
Urban environments provide landmarks, routes, walls, storefronts, transit, crowds, and visual saturation. A poem moving through a city encounters many signs competing for attention.
Drewes’s title makes “landmark” especially resonant. Orientation becomes a creative act: the poem selects which surfaces and gestures become points of reference.
Visual detail
Drewes’s imagery often arrives sharply and then changes context before it can settle into a fixed symbol. This creates a visual field that feels active and slightly unstable.
Such instability keeps perception open. A garment can become architecture; a bodily mark can become geography; an ordinary object can suddenly acquire theatrical force.
Shadow Syndrome
The title Shadow Syndrome places an immaterial image beside the language of diagnosis. A shadow depends on body and light; a syndrome suggests a recognizable cluster of conditions.
The phrase gives uncertainty a formal shape. Something visible but intangible is treated as though it could be classified, creating tension between perception and explanation.
Count Like It Calms You
Count Like It Calms You turns counting into a bodily and psychological procedure. Counting can regulate breath, create rhythm, impose sequence, or offer temporary control during stress.
The title therefore connects number with affect. Repetition becomes an action performed through the body, giving form a practical emotional function.
Editing and attention
Drewes’s editorial work adds another dimension to her literary practice. Editing depends on close reading, sequence, relation, and the ability to hear how one piece changes beside another.
This form of attention complements poems built through sound and juxtaposition. Both practices depend on noticing how language behaves in context.
A poetics of motion and hold
Drewes’s work gains coherence from the tension announced by anchor and arrow. Sound moves; the body holds memory; fashion changes the visible surface; landmarks orient movement; improvisation opens new routes.
Her poems allow these forces to remain active together. The result is a lyric practice where embodiment, sound, visual detail, and performance continually reshape one another.
Readers can continue through the site’s contemporary poets collection for related writers and traditions.