I’ll be reading at Utica College’s Macfarlane Audtiorium in Utica, NY, on Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2018, at 12:30PM. More details can be found here

Join me for a one-day intensive workshop on the prose poem on Saturday, November 10. 2018, at the Hudson Valley Writer’s Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY. The day will consist of both generative experiments and workshopping, 12:30–4:30PM. You can find more details and registration information here

Writing the Prose Poem
November 10, 12:30 – 4:30pm
Hudson Valley Writers Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY

This one-day intensive workshop will consist of generative exercises and workshop. We’ll explore the elusive form of the prose poem through reading and discussing prose poems by poets including Francis Ponge, Rosmarie Waldrop, Claudia Rankine, and Charles Simic, and writing prompts will follow each of our discussions. Each hour we’ll enter a different portal to this liminal space, shifting our starting point from objects to metaphysics to social autobiography to the surreal. The question, “What is a prose poem?,” has been notoriously difficult to answer, and we will embark on an open-ended journey. Since form can be viewed in relation to its content, the prose poem is perhaps a most uncontained form (despite its formal regularity on the page). Together, we will plumb this textual and textural space, the nascent matter in your own generative imagination. As prelude to each day’s class, we will do warm-up sensory/language experiments to flex your bodily sense-perceptions, language, and imagination, and we will conclude on the second day with an extended workshop that will give everyone the chance to refine at least one prose poem they drafted through this workshop.

Ralph Pennel reviews how do i net thee at The Iowa Review

The essential idea behind string theory is this: all fundamental particles of the Standard Model (which describes both the building blocks out of which t

he world is made and the forces through which these blocks interact) are really just different vibrating, oscillating strings. And, in many ways, this is also the shape that any work of art’s meaning takes inside us. This meaning vibrates within us at such a frequency that we are provided with ways to see how consciousness is also a consistent and fundamental component of the structure of the universe. how do i net thee, the latest collection of poetry by Shira Dentz, works to attempt just that. Each poem in the collection is a net, each line a thread, shaping and bending the fabric of meaning and what the fabric means within us. The book challenges us to simultaneously accept improbability and the improbability of singular interpretation, to work toward and against attempting to unify our curiosities, to accept that the greater truth eschews we even attempt to accept this truth. And it does so masterfully. Read more here

The University of Notre Dame is hosting the festival this year, and on Saturday, 10/6, 10:30AM—Noon, I will be participating on a panel, “(An) Alternate Notion(s) of Home,” with Johannes Görranssen, Mary-Kim Arnold, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Alison Grimaldi Donahue. Details can be found here.

Laura Hinton, Amy King, Susan Lewis, and I will be reading at The Golden Notebook Bookstore in Woodstock, NY,
at 4:30PM.

The first ever Albany Book Festival is happening Saturday, September 29, 2018, 10AM—4PM at the University of Albany, Campus Center, 1400 Washington Ave., Albany. I will have a table there with books to sell, and look forward to seeing many local authors and readers! Here‘s a list of participating local authors and here‘s a list of other participating nationally-recognized authors.

I will be reading from my work on Wednesday, September 26, 6:00pm, in the Henry Hudson Room in Fontaine Hall at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Hosted by Dr. Lea Graham and the Marist English Department, this event is free and open to the public.

“SPOKEN WORD”
Where actors, poets and writers read

Shira Dentz
Susan Lewis

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Catskills
320 Sawkill Road, Kingston, NY
Series Founder and Host: Annie LaBarge

Saturday, September 8, 7:00 pm
$5 suggested donation

Shira Dentz is the author of five full-length books and two chapbooks, most recently, door of thin skins and how do i net thee. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, and Brooklyn Rail, and featured at The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, NPR, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize. She is currently Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky, and teaches creative writing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

Susan Lewis is the author of ten books and chapbooks, including her new collection, Zoom, winner of the Washington Prize. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in numerous journals and anthologies including Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, New American Writing, The New Orleans Review, Raritan, Verse, and Web Conjunctions. She’s the founding editor of Posit, an online journal of literature and art. Her collaborations with composer Jonathan Golove have been recorded and performed at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie’s Weill Hall, and her collaborations with artist Melissa Stern have been exhibited at galleries and museums across the US.

“The way a drop,” a poem from my new book, how do i net thee, on Verse Daily!

Greetings, and happy summer!

We’re delighted to announce the newest issue of Posit, featuring brand-new poetry and prose by Devon Balwit & Jeff Whitney, Laynie Browne, Shira Dentz, Ravitte Kentwortz, Rusty Morrison, Ryan Nowlin, Kwame Opoku-Duku, Jennifer Pilch, Jessica Lee Richardson, Stephanie Strickland, AJ Urquidi, and John Sibley Williams; text + image by Helen Hofling, and visual art by Dozier Bell, Tanya Marcuse, Sam Nhlengethwa, Julie Peppito, and Adams Puryear.

Don’t miss this one — it’s wonderful.

With thanks, as ever, for your interest and support.

Susan Lewis, Bernd Sauermann, Carol Ciavonne, and Melissa Stern