Virginia Slachman is the author of The Lance and Rita Poems (co-authored with poet Kurt Brown). She is the recipient of the Elliston Prize in Poetry and her work has appeared in such literary magazines as Salmagundi and The Dominion Review. She teaches at Miami University.

About Heidegger's Temple:

"In the ongoing Romantic quest to look not at but into things, these sinuous explorations show a poet alive to the intricacies of art and nature. They trace a way of thinking--fluid, deft, open to discovery--as their supple beauty gradually teases us out of thought. In Virginia Slachman’s poems, meditation and music, the mind and the yearning heart, are one."
—Don Bogen

"Heidegger’s Temple is a first book that rewards on multiple levels. The opening poem from which the collection takes its name is not an exercise of intellectual pretense. Rather, it is a sensuous discovery, a fresh illumination of a philosophic landscape where order doesn’t depend on the centrality of the human. And so it is with the collection as a whole: layers of metaphor, exquisitely composed, beckon us to ponder new ideas or complex states of feeling that we hadn’t thought to ask for, but now have become our realities--concrete and indispensible to us. Like Modernist philosophy, art (painting, architecture, writing) provides an anchoring thread for this verse tapestry. Slachman is not content with art as allusion merely; instead she sets into play the activity of the artist, imaginatively inhabiting a given sensibility and making that way of seeing palpable. The artist who is most deeply alive in the collection, both in its imagery and its ideas, is Rainer Maria Rilke, of The New Poems and The Duino Elegies. His still-life verses (the ‘Hydrangea’ poems or ‘The Bowl of Roses,’ or his lyrical evocation of sculpted images of the divine or angelic, ‘L’Ange du Méridien’) are refigured here, but in darker emotional tones and more fractured language. Rilke’s tragic sense of death as life’s most basic process fits well with Slachman’s edgier voice and her vigilant resistance to unearned harmonies."
—Beth S. Ash