Shira Dentz

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!

Am honored to be part of Salmon Poetry, along with these Salmon poets, and to celebrate International Women’s Day 2021!

Sisyphusina won the generous Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize 2021 for a poetry collection by an Upstate New York poet. A reading will be scheduled soon in connection to the award; please stay tuned!

I love the writing that Gulf Coast has been publishing, so am especially thrilled to have two new poems in the newest issue— “Hyrax Syntax” and “Umblical dot”—and you can find them here

Taylor Swift as Books liked my new book, Sisyphusina (Pank Books), on Instagram yesterday!