Shira Dentz

I have four readings coming up this month:

A new review of Sisyphusina (Pank Books, 2020), in Tupelo Quarterly!

Here’s an excerpt from “Sanctioned Poetries: A Review of Shira Dentz’s Sisyphusina“:

“The images in the book are relentless, both in the mental pictures they create, and in their sonics, like when Dentz writes in the poem “saidst” (a productive transposition of sadist, maybe):

kind of light makes all the difference. Stark lightning white lines in the light stripes on a

bee, be body a mast dragged against the snow rigor mortis legs rasping across the hard,      screams of the trapped.

This is beautiful writing, but more than that, it throws the rest of the book into high relief, displaying more vividly the resistant writer Dentz seems to be. The book might be read, then, as a reimagining not only of the female body and the historical and cultural expectations tied to it, but also of the beauty expectations tied to poems. Any hegemonic demand for coherence and beauty is exclusionary, and the poems throughout this book, in their expansiveness of both subject matter and page space, work to clear the way for that which has been excluded. I’m reminded now of a phrase so often heard: There are too many poets in the world. Maybe, but perhaps there are too few sanctioned poetries.”

Please read the full review here!

Am honored to be part of Salmon Poetry, along with these Salmon poets, and to celebrate International Women’s Day 2021!

Sisyphusina won the generous Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize 2021 for a poetry collection by an Upstate New York poet. A reading will be scheduled soon in connection to the award; please stay tuned!

I love the writing that Gulf Coast has been publishing, so am especially thrilled to have two new poems in the newest issue— “Hyrax Syntax” and “Umblical dot”—and you can find them here

Taylor Swift as Books liked my new book, Sisyphusina (Pank Books), on Instagram yesterday!

“Subterranean Fires”

Michael Peverett closely reads “Penmanship of Trees,” a poem in my book how do i net thee (Salmon Poetry), and places it within the context of my other books, including Sisyphusina (PANK Books), in his review at Intercapillary Space (based in the UK). You can read what he has to say here. And here’s an excerpt:

Shira Dentz is an author who willingly courts the term “hybrid”. She began as a graphic designer working in the music industry, and you can see that background in the remarkable care given to the presentation of how do i net thee; its jacket, title page, the intricate typesetting and visual layouts. Some of her other books, such as door of thin skins (2013, about psychological abuse) and Sisyphusina (2020, about women’s aging and beauty) intermix a lot of documentary and fictional prose. These books admit content in a way that much experimental poetry doesn’t; in other words, the kind of content we’re inclined to call “straightforward”, though the books themselves show how “straightforward” isn’t an adequate description.

“An early sandwich” and “Indoors, we watch the wind press against things”