The Birds

“A distinction not dissimilar from geometries of flight in darkness”

by Shira Dentz February 6, 2019

“Shira Dentz’s third full-length book, how do i net thee, begs the response its title invokes: “let me count the ways.” The ways of this collection are numerous, from the modified dictionary entry for “net” that announces the book’s scope with a long, curving black line that swoops in upon its text—a thread of the object being defined—to short lyrics to prose poems to typographical experiments. Who, or what, can be captured in such open forms is this book’s question, and it asks it in the aftermath of personal and familial loss.” Continue reading this review in Colorado Review here

Rachel Abramowitz reviews how do i net thee in the new issue of Seneca Review

and Travis Sharp reviews how do i net thee at Entropy:

“… with globalized capitalism’s pernicious linking-together of everyone, everything, and everywhere, we could say that the grid is the current ordering of the world, how we are ordered into neat and tidy conceptual apartments (for everyone and everything has their place). At the same time, the grid is a metaphor for the most living need: the desire for filiation or connection, the threading-together of many into a messy and always-incomplete whole. It is within this complex and double-edged sense of the grid, or the net, that Shira Dentz’s how do i net thee works, as she threads together the messy and necessarily imperfect familial ties that serve as a throughline throughout the book, while at the same time composing poems that are deeply skeptical of the nets she casts—or is caught up within…

…Jill Magi’s frontispiece to the book provides a sense of this flailing grid, the squares contorted into curious shapes, and with loose trails of thread that betray the illusion of closedness or completion that a grid gives off. ” Read Travis Sharp’s full review at Entropy here

END OF YEAR ISSUE,DIAGRAM ISSUE 18.6

Henri Cole, Orphic Paris, NYRB, 2018; Shira Dentz, how do i net thee, Salmon Poetry, 2018; Galen Strawson, Things that bother me., NYRB, 2018

Reviewed by Martin Corless-Smith

“Unlike Cole on his melancholic literary tour, Dentz is not carving a memorial stone, she is more concerned with showing how strange it is that this language-thing might be played to show the on-going spectacle of being. One looks back, one looks forward.”

You can read the Corless-Smith’s  full meditative essay here

Poetry

Poet/Clark Coolidge

how do i net thee/Shira Dentz

The Boneyard, The Birth Manual: Investigations into the Heartland/Julia Madsen

Nicoque of the Early-Spring/Francis Ponge

Moon/Jennifer S. Cheng

Dear Angel of Death/Simone White

Of All Places In This Place Of All Places/Joe Milazzo

Lo Tercario, The Tertiary/Raquel Salas Rivera

The Scales/Adam Stutz

The Desert/Brandon Shimoda

Recombinant/Ching-In Chen

Dark Hour/Nadia de Vries

How to Tell If You Are Human/Jessy Randall

Saturday, Dec. 22, 2019, 12:30–6:30PM, Hudson River Coffee House, Albany, NY

Please join us for a complete reading through the great long poem Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer with the author. Also reading will be & other persons mentioned in the book; local poets & distant poets, traveling from far & wide to pay tribute to a legendary author and book.

Bernadette Mayer with
Lee Ann Brown
Katy Bohinc
Shira Dentz
Marcella Durand
Cole Heinowitz
Erica Kaufman
Amy King
Michael Ruby
Adam Tedesco
Tony Torn
Sam Truitt
Sara Jane Stoner
Kina Viola-Cain
Marty Viola-Cain
& others . . .

Thanks to Michael Schiavo for including my new poems, “Prism,” “Rain Loaves,” “the invention of heaven,” “imagine a day without pain,” and “wax moon” in the final series of THE EQUALIZER with poems by exciting poets Samuel Ace, Jeff Alessandrelli, Zachary Anderson, Rae Armantrout, Steve Barbaro, Alan Bernheimer, Elizabeth Bevilacqua, Cathleen Bonner, Ana Božičević, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Simon Brown, Megan Burns, Jenna Cardinale, Ching-In Chen, Lauren Rose Clark, Shane Clements, Clark Coolidge, Jack Davis, Jordan Davis, Shira Dentz, Christopher DeWeese, Cody Donovan, Trezlen Drake, Carolina Ebeid, Zack Finch, Jessica Fisher, Graham Foust, Benjamin Friedlander, Schuyler Greenway, Phillip Griffith, Luke Hankins, Nathan Hauke, Maximilian Heinegg, Destiny Hemphill, Walidah Imarisha, Mason Just, Robin Kirby, Michael Lally, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, Carlos Gomez Marquez, Maya Marshall, Charlie Martin, Farid Matuk, Charlee Meiners, Lynn Melnick, Catherine Meng, Sharon Mesmer, Philip Metres, Robert Mittenthal, Gina Myers, Sanjana Nair, Urayoán Noel, Alice Notley, Dylan Nutter, Jena Osman, John Pluecker, Alex Quinn, Raquel Salas Rivera, Anthony Robinson, Judith Roitman, Jan Sanderson, Adam Strauss, Jacob Sunderlin, Eileen R. Tabios, Adam Tedesco, TC Tolbert, Gabriella Torres, Sarah Trudgeon, Jennifer Tseng, Vickie Vértiz, Emylisa Warrick, Afaa Michael Weaver, Stephen Scott Whitaker, Geoffrey Young, Timothy Yu

Download it here!

SHIRA DENTZ            DENIS GRAY          JANET HAMILL

HOSTED BY GEORGE WALLACE

Tuesday, December 04, 2018

Apology

a-p-o-lo apo lo l-o-g-y—

read the rest of the poem here

“After-After”