Shira Dentz

Jessica Goodfellow reviews Sisyphusina at Barrelhouse

here are excerpts:

“How many poems there are about male aging in the canon? Their proliferation makes the implicit assumption that the male experience is the default for aging. For example, searching the Academy of American Poets website yields twenty-four example poems on the topic, only two of which are by women. Where are the poems about menopause, the loss of conventional beauty markers, and the invisibility of the aging woman in society? Dentz, in seeking to make room for such female experiences, finds that exploring and bending space is a necessary response, as is the augmentation of words with images and music.”

&

“On top of dizzyingly original arrangements of words and forms, this collection offers artistic and musical collaborations, which are better experienced than described. Either a QR code at the end of the book or an online link will take you to the sound performance “Aging Music,” performed by Pauline Oliveras, which was co-imagined with Dentz’s Sisyphusina. Additionally, a poem-film based on Dentz’s “saidst,” jointly made with Kathy High, is available online. With so many modalities for the witnessing the exploration on women’s aging, Dentz has more than done her part to record this complicated experience, available vocabulary notwithstanding, for the future canon.”

On the Seawall, “Swatch,” “Tree,” “Mozart’s Colander”

Big City Lit, “Wolf Shadow”

Sharing my new eco poem in the newest issue of The Idaho Review that I first wrote and presented at “The Mind’s Eye” co-hosted by MassMOCA and Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) for SLOW: A Symposium on Praxis & Theory.

Honored to be among the contributors to this innovative new anthology!

Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology (Wave Blue World, 2021)
Edited by Wendy and Tyler Chin-Tanner

Poems by: Kenzie Allen, Ruth Awad, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Wendy Chin-Tanner, Kendra DeColo, Shira Dentz, 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 Villarreal, Khaty Xiong.

Art by: Weshoyot Alvitre, Lesley Atlansky, Ned Barnett, Morgan Beem, Carola Borelli, Rio Burton, Mia Casesa, Gab Contreras, Marika Cresta, Kelly Fitzpatrick, Ronnie Garcia, Jen Hickman, Liana Kangas, Miss Lasko-Gross, Soo Lee, Jessica Lynn, Takeia Marie, Hazel Newlevant, Emily Pearson, Kaylee Rowena, Y. Sanders, Ayşegül Sınav, Stelladia, Jude Vignants, Ashley A. Woods, Sara Wooley

Letters by Cardinal Rae and Saida Temofonte
Cover by Claudia Ianniciello

Mystical, rooted, painful, joyous, and ecstatic; visions of the body, our genders, and our very identities from across the spectrum of contemporary poetry come together in this monumental intersectional feminist anthology where verse and comics unite in spectacular new ways.

The New Orleans Poetry Festival returns!

The publisher of my book THE SUN A BLAZING ZERO, Lavender Ink / Diálogos, is proud to be one of the founding organizers of The New Orleans Poetry Festival. The fest returns after a one-year Covid hiatus with a full month of online programming this April. The opening event features a hybrid performance of readings from the new anthology I Am New Orleans, and programming continues with readings, workshops and roundtables every day for the entire month. Everything is free and open to all to Zoom in. See the complete calendar and access events at nolapoetry.com.

Lavender Ink / Diálogos Reading plus Tribute to Anny Ballardini

Lavender Ink / Diálogos presents a reading by recently published authors, including Erin Lierl (A Child of Many Waters), Shira Dentz (the sun a blazing zero), Vincent Farnsworth (Absence Like Sun), and Rosemary Daniell (The Murderous Sky).

Also in this session, a tribute Anny Ballardini, a lovely friend of the press, who has recently passed, with readings from her work by friends.

• Bill Lavender
• Erin Lierl
• Vincent A. Cellucci
• Shira Dentz
• Rosemary Daniell

April 18, 3:00 pm Central Daylight Time(4:00 pm EDT, 2:00 pm MDT, 1:00 pm PDT) Join on Zoom | Watch on Facebook All Zoom events are recorded.

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!