Steffi Drewes is a poet and editor whose work is shaped by sound, improvisation, visual detail, embodiment, and the unstable border between logic and mystery. Her poems often begin with a phrase, image, or sonic collision and develop through repetition, mutation, and associative movement.
Her full-length collection Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow was published by Kelsey Street Press in 2016. Drewes has also published poems and prose in journals including Bennington Review, New American Writing, Phoebe, Fourteen Hills, and MAKE.
Steffi Drewes in Shampoo
Shampoo published Drewes in Issues 27 and 37. Issue 27 presented “Proper Fittings” and “Whether to Yelp: Window Sonnet #3.” Issue 37 later published the six-part “Lasso New Landmarks: Stitched In Skin.” Together the poems show a practice built from sonic pressure, abrupt turns, fashion and body imagery, urban scenes, humor, and fragments of speech.
These appearances place Drewes within Shampoo’s archive of contemporary poets and connect her work with a wider field of experimental poetry.
Sound and improvisation
In a 2010 interview, Drewes described beginning from words or phrases whose sounds seem to belong together even when their meanings pull in different directions. That method is audible throughout the Shampoo poems: consonants cluster, phrases ricochet, and syntax keeps changing direction while maintaining a strong rhythmic drive.
The result often resembles improvisation. Repetition establishes a pattern, then the poem bends or interrupts it. Sound becomes a way of discovering thought rather than simply decorating an already settled statement.
Body, image, and visual culture
“Lasso New Landmarks: Stitched In Skin” moves through fashion, performance, city space, visual art, tattoos, stage presence, and bodily gesture. The poem treats image-making as a physical act, allowing clothing, makeup, architecture, and movement to become part of its vocabulary.
This sensitivity to visual composition gives Drewes a distinct place within contemporary American poetry shaped by collage, feminist experiment, performance, and the crosscurrents between literary and visual culture.
Recent work
Drewes continues to publish poetry. Bennington Review has published work from Count Like It Calms You, and her manuscript Shadow Syndrome was named a semifinalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition in 2022.
Further reading
The Poetry Project’s archive documents Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow and Drewes’s work with Kelsey Street Press. Bennington Review presents more recent poetry.