Shira Dentz

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

Megan Burns reviews door of thin skins:

“Poetry is fiction that is born from truth…” //  “What unlocks the unlocked voice? Can it be simply said or is the space that poetry inhabits, a space that teaches us to see where we once were blind, as close as we can get?” Thank you, Megan Burns and Rain Taxi.

Organizational principles. Shira Dentz’s door of thin skins has a few. Persona. Metaphor. Hearts. Birds. Diagrams. What Dentz does so well in this collection is to connect then turn inside-out these organizations.

Nicole Walker reviews door of thin skins here

The brilliance of Door of Thin Skins lies not only in the narrative, but also in the way Shira Dentz stretches and fractures language, not just to report on damage, but to enact damage, trauma and the mind’s desperate attempt to become, then remain, truthful and clear. Words and sentences are broken, obsessively repeated, morphed, made shadowy, made wispy. Words, like things, stand on their heads.

by Ann Fisher-Wirth, here

door of thin skins is reviewed by Jane L. Carman in the current issue of American Book Review, Sex Writing, edited by Cris Mazza.

Project MUSE – Triple Shot

The text contracts, jumps, exceeds the margins of a conventional page, stretching as long as Dr. Abe’s legendary, menacing hands. Dentz uses typography to portray the split between the speaker’s experience and her reach for language to articulate it, such as when Dr. Abe is “[ . . .    ] v  o  y e u  ristic / The word eases into shape/ hangs like sunlight.”

Nicole Sheets reviews door of thin skins in Diagram New Michigan Press here!