Shira Dentz

You can read more about Sisyphusina in this feature at POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA :

Shira Dentz on “Sisyphusina”

POETRY TODAY: TRUST AND IDEALISM • Poetry Today features living poets answering questions about poetry and poetics.

You can read Ruben Quesada’s interview with me about Sisyphusina in Kenyon Review here

Here are two excerpts from Cody Stetzel’s review of Sisyphusina in Colorado Review:

What I admire about Sisyphusina is that whether through time, the self, or the image at work, there is an attempt at definition even if it is an untrustworthy definition. The willingness to tempt solution, I think, is a particularly innovative flourish throughout the work.

What we think is a total picture
is a series, an addition of parts.

&

In the end, Sisyphusina reminds me very much of the interpsychic demonstrations that Clarice Lispector offers, and the work brought me back to a quote from The Passion According to G.H.––“Give me your unknown hand, since life is hurting me, and I don’t know how to speak—.” That in all of its work is both the known and unknown hand, yearning for some form of assistance in creating the picture. Lispector would very much create a character whose realness startled her, and in this way I found Dentz’s written moments like in “Flounders,”

I seem to not want to explore my feeling now that she was
almost burning to the next room tearing up those papers.

to yield a refreshing innovation, almost burning, yielding nothing to the confining limitations of tradition, expectation, and a poetic world.

You can read the full review at Colorado Review here

Pangyrus features my poem,”Slight of Hand,” in their writing on the pandemic series titled IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH :

I’ve come for you, cushion-soft
instead of being wrapped, we’re loose salt
and spray / solid and shadow at once

(you can read the entire poem here)

“Slide” is noted at Yes, Poetry in “Here’s What Resonated with You in 2020”

Ruben Queseda interviews me about my new book, SISYPHUSINA, in Kenyon Review‘s Poetry Today: Trust and Idealism

Poetry Today features living poets answering questions about poetry and poetics.

“I took up the challenge of writing about aging within the context of my own life. I gave myself freedom to use all types of media and to play with the nuances of typography as part of my writing process.”

Read the full interview here

Three great poets reading from the Caffe Lena stage in Saratoga Springs, NY, Wed. Dec. 2: David Graham, Shira Dentz and Rana Bitar. Livestream starts at 7PM on Facebook or Youtube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwrlnzHXGSI

Embodied, an intersectional feminist poetry-as-comics anthology is due out in May 2020!

Embodied is a collaboration between cis female, trans, and non-binary poets and comics artists published by A Wave Blue World and edited by Wendy Chin-Tanner.

Am thrilled to have poetry in Embodied along with Kenzie Allen, Ruth Awad, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Kendra DeColo, Carolina Ebeid, Jenn Givhan, Caroline Hagood, Laura Hinton, JP Howard, Omotara James, Virginia Konchan, Miller Oberman, Khadijah Queen, Maggie Smith, Diane Suess, Sokunthary Svay, Venus Thrash, Paul Tran, Vanessa Villareal, and Khaty Xiong! You can preview here

A new poem, “Spring ruffles in,” is LOVE’S EXECUTIVE ORDER‘s weekly poem on the Trump presidency and you can read it here!

You can read Rachel Abramowitz review, “To defy the gods: Form, Resilience, & Capaciousness in Shira Dentz’s SISYPHUSINA” in Tupelo Quarterly here

(an excerpt)
“In the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus, king of Corinth and “the most cunning of men” (Illiad, 6:153), cheats death twice, once by actually holding Death hostage (thus giving humans a short break from Death’s perpetual trade), and the second time by talking his way out of the Underworld. With characteristic relish, Zeus sentences Sisyphus to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a hill, only to watch it tumble down again. Philosophers and psychoanalysts have—somewhat ironically, considering their output—used the image of Sisyphus to illustrate the meaninglessness of the human condition. In Sisyphusina, her new collection of poetry, Shira Dentz imagines a modern, feminized version of Sisyphus, who is imprisoned within a society that requires women to push the boulder of beauty, fertility, and sexual desirability up an emotional hill over and over again, achieving nothing, meaning nothing. While of course mortal women age and eventually die, Sisyphusina presents a generational immortality which is no more bearable. And yet, it is Dentz’s fascinating experiments with form, image, subject, and typography that place her most in conversation with Albert Camus’ 1942 version of the myth, in which “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Camus’ figure outwits Zeus by assigning meaning to his otherwise meaningless task (and, after all, gains the immortality he so desires). Contemporary artists, it seems, exist somewhere between the two views of Sisyphus: embedded in their assignation of meaning is always failure—in the best art, failure is compelling and generative, rather than nihilistic. That’s great for Sisyphus (as it is for Camus), but Dentz’s collection begs the question: What does happiness—if it is at all possible—look like for Sisyphusina?”