"Poetry: According to the scholar and poet, Charles Stein: "Magic is pragmatic, or better performative, phenomenology. But phenomenology is the magic of ontogeny." Robert Podgurski's In the Shadow of This Branch is itself deeply invested in a thaumaturgy or wonder working of the magic of nascency. The poems in this collection beg the question of what leads up to and what is happening as things labor to come into being. As Michal Ajvas expressed in his novel, Empty Streets "I realized that in trying to express what a thing communicated, I was making a thing of the communication-an unusual and fantastic thing perhaps, but of what is not yet a thing, a matter from which things are formed." And yet, Podgurski is not so presumptuous as to assert he knows precisely what this process of emergence is, but that it warrants acknowledgment, further exploration, and to facilitate the possession of the senses in its sway"--