The Dessa code

Dessa looms over her pint of Budweiser at the Leaning Tower of Pizza in Uptown, plumbing her relationship with fact and fiction. As she muses on the phantom fault line that separates the two, she makes the gesture of a sculptor molding a gob of clay.

"I like frank, candid art," she says flatly. "If that entails vulnerability, then I'm game. But I don't think vulnerability good art makes. We're confused into imagining that a very frank exposé, because it took bravery, makes good art. Sometimes, we fall off the cliff into exhibitionism in a way that I think is unattractive."

As an MC, poet and the sole female member of the hip-hop collective known as Doomtree, Dessa is as intricately composed as a puzzle box, an artist who has spent the past half-decade mastering the art of fleeting intimacy -- and of being frank and candid even while she eludes scrutiny in her veils of confounding, beautiful language.

At the minute mark of "Children's Work," the opening track of her full-length solo debut, "A Badly Broken Code," Dessa compares her father to a paper plane and her mother to a windswept tree. Before you can dwell too long on that allegory, she's sketching a panicked self-portrait of a woman fatigued by her own mind, obsessed with knowledge, empowered by her imagination. And over the course of the album's 15 tracks, Dessa becomes an exacting cartographer of the mind's hidden chambers -- an artist nimble enough to expose her frailest vulnerabilities in one rhyme, only to draw the drapes in the next.

"We break the genome and spend years trying to figure out what we're made of," she says. "Meanwhile, we don't understand our own language. We don't understand our own morality. We have all this information, and none of it jells into knowledge. It feels like we're almost there, all the time."

It's a topic -- mankind's tempestuous relationship to its own knowledge -- that Dessa has spent countless rhymes commenting on.

Dessa was born under the sign of Gemini at Fairview Hospital in 1981. Her mother was, in fact, a PR entrepreneur, and her father was a renaissance man: a classical guitarist, a writer, a scholar and an airplane pilot. From the start, Dessa was a wary learner and a literate thinker. But she was also a self-critical, intense youth.

As a student at the University of Minnesota, Dessa had her literary talents piqued by exposure to writers like David Sedaris and Dave Eggers. But by the time she graduated with a philosophy degree, her writing life had stagnated. Fearful of the obscure, uphill climb to literary prominence, and intimidated by trying to live up to her own standards, her writing life sat at a low simmer.

"I didn't realize how salty I'd become -- at myself more than anybody else," she says. "There was something that I really loved that seemed hard and scary, so I put it on the back burner. The most private parts of me worried that it was because I wasn't sure how to get the validation from it that I needed."

On Valentine's Day 2002, Dessa found herself at a poetry slam at Kieran's Irish Pub, where her roommate urged her to compose a couple of poems and compete. Dessa obliged, returned in March with a small poem, and won. The victory obligated her to a year of competition, and within months she was touring the nation, facing down top talents like Sage Francis, the Rhode Island rapper who would become an avatar of the burgeoning subgenre of introspective indie hip-hop. "I dug it," she says. "I got to meet poets on a national level, and I was very immediately reeducated on my perceived level of skill."

She grins. "Minneapolis was a small pond. I thought I was kicking ass, and I really wasn't."

As her spoken-word abilities sharpened, hip-hop slowly began to infiltrate her life: A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang Clan, De La Soul. But one group in particular stood out. On an unglamorous burned disc, she heard hip-hop of startling rawness. The recording was rough and loud. Where other hip-hop seemed to live in a vacuum, this music seemed to inhabit a living world, rife with sonic detritus. Dessa was immediately fascinated.

At a Sage Francis gig in '03, Dessa opened the show with a single poem. P.O.S. from Doomtree was in the crowd. Awestruck, he sought her out after the show, and within months she was recording her first solo track, "Hawks and Herons," at the crew's south Minneapolis manse, Doom Manor.

"You'd open the basement door if it wasn't wedged shut with clutter," she says of the bygone headquarters. "You'd walk down the stairs, which always had cigarettes on each side. There were two studio rooms there. One was used to track vocals. One was a control room. No window. We didn't even have talkback. The engineer would have to come around the door to talk to the performer." She smiles in fondness. "I sang a three-note descent, and they wanted a harmony. So I made one up. It was a minor key, descending. It was the first time I could tell they were into it."

Dessa was asked to join the crew, and ever since she has been absorbed in a creative environment as close-knit as a guild of assassins. When she released "Spiral Bound," an anthology of her written work, in 2009, the Doomtree seal was emblazoned on its spine. And with a few exceptions, the lion's share of the production work on "A Badly Broken Code" was handled by Doomtree producers MK Larada and Paper Tiger.

It's a case of seamless mutualism: Where Doomtree's production makes "Code" pleasantly familiar terrain, Dessa's imaginative wanderings elevate the product into the realm of serious poetry.

Dessa's rise to prominence has made her one of just a few local female MCs who have managed to escape the powerful gravitational fields of prejudice and objectification.

In an industry where women are constantly coerced into selling themselves cheaply for roles that would demean anyone of intelligence, Dessa has flatly refused to compromise. Part of the reason for that, she says, is that she got into the game late. "At the age when a lot of female MCs would get involved, they haven't been given an opportunity to formulate self-direction," she says. "I mean, I was a latecomer, and being a latecomer hamstrung me. I had a lot of catch-up to do. But I was lucky because I was a grown woman with strong ideas about what I would and wouldn't do as an artist."

With a debut album in the can, a published book and a wealth of performing and recording experience, plenty of artists would cut some time to revel in self-satisfaction and take a breather. But Dessa's ambitions don't grant her the luxury of inaction, and she's already mapping her next maneuvers. So what are her plans?

Dessa keeps mum. They're lofty enough that she's loath to jinx them with a mention.

"I won't share them," she says with a smirk. "They're ambitious, and you sound like a nut case, in the same way you sound like a nut case when you tell your parents you want to be an astronaut. It puts a lot on the line to say it."

She falls momentarily pensive, then slyly steeples her fingers. The intensity of her gaze suggests fathoms: This map, quite obviously, was drawn up long ago. "I want to be a major contributor," she says.