Tupelo Quarterly‘s 17th Issue released today! There are a whole host of fabulous writers and artists including, but certainly not limited to, Erica Wright, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Jennifer K. Sweeney & L.I. Henley, Caroline Crew, Sara Henning, Veronica Golos, Angie Macri, Kristi Maxwell, Nancy Reddy, Michael Schmeltzer, Allison Titus, Donald Morrill, Shira Dentz, Jane Wong, and many others!
Here’s a link to my prose piece in the new issue of Tupelo Quarterly, “Morning Glories”
Join me, Adam Tedesco, author of MARY OLIVER (Lithic Press, 2019), and S. Tourjee, author of SAM SAYS SAM (Spuyten Devil, 2018) as we read and discuss our poetry and newly published collections at Amherst Books
Shira Dentz is the author of five books and two chapbooks, including how do i net thee (Salmon Poetry, 2018), FLOUNDERS (Essay Press, 2016) and door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press, 2014). Her writing appears in many venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, jubilat, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and NPR. Her poems have received awards including an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem Award, and Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Memorial Award. A graduate of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah, and currently is Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky and teaches in Upstate NY. Her books have been reviewed widely including in American Book Review, Rain Taxi, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, and The Rumpus. More about her writing can be found at www.shiradentz.com
Poet and video artist Adam Tedesco is a founding editor of REALITY BEACH, a journal of new poetics. His video work has been shown at MoMA PS1, among other venues. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Laurel Review, jubilat, Prelude, Powderkeg, Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. He is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Misrule (Ursus Americanus), and the poetry collection Mary Oliver (Lithic Press).
S. Tourjee is a writer, performer, educator, and media & book artist. They are the author of Sam Says, Sam, published by Spuyten Duyvil in October 2018, as well as two chapbooks: Ghost (2013) and When Tongue Was Muscle (2016), both published by Anomalous Press. In 2014, Ghost was adapted for ballet by the Berkshire Choreography Project. S. holds an MFA from Brown University, was a 2015-2016 Artist-in-Residence at Joshua Tree National Park, and was a finalist of the MacColl Johnson Fellowship in 2019. From 2013-2017, they were co-director of Frequency Writers, a nonprofit writing organization. They now serve as Grants Manager at AS220 in Providence RI. More at stourjee.com
my new book, the sun a blazing zero, is pre-launching now and the publisher at Lavender Ink/Diálogos is offering it at a pre-launch discount sale through the end of March for $14! You can order it here!
the sun a blazing zero tracks the vibrations of a receding world that hasn’t yet entirely vanished. Its language-map moves towards intensifying a lyric field to articulate experiences that lack vocabulary, and to ride with/not rebut the noise of information-overload in contemporary psyches. A feminist assemblage, the sun a blazing zero weaves the personal and sociopolitical through shifting shutter speeds.
“Welcoming the / crackling from one snap of think,” Shira Dentz’s latest collection, the sun a blazing zero, leaps synaptically (and syntactically) from sensation to affect, from self to cosmos, and from heartbreak to wonder. Under a literary constellation composed of William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, Vito Acconci, and Susan Howe, this poet invites us to join her in “building a house open to the elements.” The views from this exposed literary shelter are simply breathtaking. You can watch “mountains / like flame, / only slower.” Those unaccustomed to the cold at such altitudes are invited to wrap themselves in “mourning, the heaviest fabric.” Dentz shows us how to dwell in worlds far from home.”
—Srikanth Chicu Reddy
If Emily Dickinson wants to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Shira Dentz wants “the lines to open. to be jagged, smeared, and tilted.” That wish, expressed late in Dentz’s new book, does not substitute forthe deed, but describesthe deed performed by the poetry that precedes it. the sun a blazing zerois full of jagged, smeared, and tilted lines, of poems “open to the elements.”
—H. L. Hix
In these poems, we find “a glint like an eye’s: yolk yellow, crayon thick,” a sonic “hue do” where senses intertwine and words lead one into the next breathlessly opening and opening again. Dentz’s poems leave spaces agape, even in their sonic onrush, to allow for “a question mark, which is by its space to be slept wafting.” Her porous poetics blankets the small and uncertain self in rich language that makes us more comfortable with loss, death, cold, and the unknown—those “blazing zeroes” where uncertainty becomes palpable.
—Amaranth Borsuk
These fine-grained, loose-limbed poems stay lightly with the contact zone where senses meet day. The zone precipitates scenes and memories, hi-def images, half-words. Notation coalesces into sensate palmate structures, affective fractals, till moments wheel like murmurations. Blazing Zero is gestural, avid, and moving, multi-ways.
—Catherine Wagner
“Encompassing our past and present in a flirtatious and exuberant display of lyric immediacy, Dentz stretches our textural engagement with memory and history – feminism, the Holocaust, gardens and animals with texts that read like improvisatory jazz fugues. A pleasure to read and to look at.”
—Erica Baum
Check out the March 2019 issue of Poetry Magazine here, and my poems “Mango hats stood out from the rest” and “At the End of the Day“
This weekend, March 9–10, I’m teaching an intensive workshop on the prose poem at The Word Barn, 66 Newfields Road, in Exeter, NH. More info and registration here.
Space is limited, and registration is open until Friday, March 8–there are just three spots left!
In this two-day workshop, we’ll explore the elusive form of the prose poem through reading, discussion, writing experiments, and workshop. We’ll read and discuss prose poems by poets including Francis Ponge, Rosmarie Waldrop, Claudia Rankine, and Charles Simic, and unconventional writing prompts will follow each of our discussions. As prelude to each day’s class, we will do warm-up sensory/language experiments to flex your bodily sense-perceptions, language, and imagination, and we will conclude on the second day with an extended workhop that will give everyone the chance to refine at least one prose poem they drafted through this workshop.
“A distinction not dissimilar from geometries of flight in darkness”
by Shira Dentz February 6, 2019
“Shira Dentz’s third full-length book, how do i net thee, begs the response its title invokes: “let me count the ways.” The ways of this collection are numerous, from the modified dictionary entry for “net” that announces the book’s scope with a long, curving black line that swoops in upon its text—a thread of the object being defined—to short lyrics to prose poems to typographical experiments. Who, or what, can be captured in such open forms is this book’s question, and it asks it in the aftermath of personal and familial loss.” Continue reading this review in Colorado Review here
Rachel Abramowitz reviews how do i net thee in the new issue of Seneca Review
and Travis Sharp reviews how do i net thee at Entropy:
“… with globalized capitalism’s pernicious linking-together of everyone, everything, and everywhere, we could say that the grid is the current ordering of the world, how we are ordered into neat and tidy conceptual apartments (for everyone and everything has their place). At the same time, the grid is a metaphor for the most living need: the desire for filiation or connection, the threading-together of many into a messy and always-incomplete whole. It is within this complex and double-edged sense of the grid, or the net, that Shira Dentz’s how do i net thee works, as she threads together the messy and necessarily imperfect familial ties that serve as a throughline throughout the book, while at the same time composing poems that are deeply skeptical of the nets she casts—or is caught up within…
…Jill Magi’s frontispiece to the book provides a sense of this flailing grid, the squares contorted into curious shapes, and with loose trails of thread that betray the illusion of closedness or completion that a grid gives off. ” Read Travis Sharp’s full review at Entropy here
END OF YEAR ISSUE,DIAGRAM ISSUE 18.6
Henri Cole, Orphic Paris, NYRB, 2018; Shira Dentz, how do i net thee, Salmon Poetry, 2018; Galen Strawson, Things that bother me., NYRB, 2018
Reviewed by Martin Corless-Smith
“Unlike Cole on his melancholic literary tour, Dentz is not carving a memorial stone, she is more concerned with showing how strange it is that this language-thing might be played to show the on-going spectacle of being. One looks back, one looks forward.”
You can read the Corless-Smith’s full meditative essay here
Poet/Clark Coolidge
how do i net thee/Shira Dentz
The Boneyard, The Birth Manual: Investigations into the Heartland/Julia Madsen
Nicoque of the Early-Spring/Francis Ponge
Moon/Jennifer S. Cheng
Dear Angel of Death/Simone White
Of All Places In This Place Of All Places/Joe Milazzo
Lo Tercario, The Tertiary/Raquel Salas Rivera
The Scales/Adam Stutz
The Desert/Brandon Shimoda
Recombinant/Ching-In Chen
Dark Hour/Nadia de Vries
How to Tell If You Are Human/Jessy Randall
