door of thin skins is short-listed for Utah’s 13 Bytes Ma1gazine‘s poetry book prize:
“In Dentz’s fever dream of abuse in a patient/doctor relationship, the typographical and prose poetry mirrors the disintegration of the confused mind of the patient in a tour de force that is as curiously ennobling as it is shocking.” Read more here.
is reviewed in Chronogram‘s annual poetry roundup in its June 2014 issue here. The lineup of poets and books are:
Celia Bland/Dianne Kornberg – Madonna Comix (William James)
Shira Dentz – door of thin skins (CavanKerry)
Sarah Heady – Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills)
Kasey Jueds – Keeper (U. Pittsburgh)
David Kherdian – Living in Quiet (Tavnon)
Jeffrey McDaniel – Chapel of Inadvertent Joy (U. Pittsburgh)
Will Nixon – My Clone (Bushwhack)
Michael Perkins – A Splendor Among Shadows (Bushwhack)
Gretchen Primack – Doris’ Red Spaces (Mayapple)
Donna Reis – No Passing Zone (Deerbrook)
Michael Ruby – American Songbook (Ugly Duckling)
Rebecca Schumejda – Waiting at the Dead End Diner (Bottom Dog)
in Upstate NY:
Woodstock’s Kleinert James Art Center, NY, June 28 at 6PM
Writers Read, Good Purpose Gallery, 40 Main Street, Lee, MA, June 26 at 6PM
Caffe Lena, Saratoga Springs, NY, with Suzanne Parker, June 4 at 7:30PM
Community of Jewish Writers’ Event, Beth Agudat Achim, Schenectady, NY, May 19 at 7:30PM
JCC Schenectady, NY, May 18 at 2PM
reviewed by Danielle Cadenza Deulen in The Georgia Review
Part of National Poetry Month
Russell Sage College (Part Reading + Community Share + Part Q&A)
April 1, 7PM, Meader Little Theater, Free & Open to the Public
Panel includes:
Shira Dentz
faculty at RPI, editor for Drunken Boat
Dan Wilcox
longtime Albany open mic host,
independent publisher, and
peace activist
K. Mojavi Wright
director of Urban Guerilla Theatre,
organizer for the Albany Slam Team
Cara Benson
administrator for Millay Colony and
Belladonna Feminist Literary Collective,
teacher of poetry in New York state prisons
James Belflower
co-curator, with Matthew Klane, of
the Yes! Poetry & Performance Series
Elizabethe Kelley
Associate Professor of English,
Arts and Letters at Sage
“It is emotionally complex and riveting despite its detachment. It complicates the label of confessional poetry or memoir with its formal agility and its conceptual demands of its reader. It is a welcome addition to those books that teach us how to read a poem and those that teach us how to translate and interpret trauma. One phrase from Abe stands out, and I can’t help but want to strip it of its sadism, let it act as an indicator of all the good that Dentz and this book have done: ‘Your life will be different now that I’m in it.’” Michael McLane
Read full review here http://www.cutbankonline.org/2014/01/06/cutbank-reviews-door-of-thin-skins-by-shira-dentz/
“I am grateful the poet created this book.” Read full review by Eileen Tabios
“Perhaps we need a new genre to define Dentz’s work: autobio-poetics, for example, work that mines intense (in this case, devastating) personal experience through hybrid forms for its lyric potential and narrative exigencies creating a text that is part memoir/part experimental poetry.
Finally, if door of thin skins is a difficult read, it’s not because of the form, the style, the language, or its hybrid nature—it’s the sad, terrifying, and infuriating story it tells. It is, nonetheless, compulsively readable, the kind of book I can’t put down. The kind I go back to again and again finding something new, no less astounding, on each subsequent reading.”
Read full review of DOOR OF THIN SKINS by Sima Rabinowitz here
