Shira Dentz

in HTML Giant:

The retina is brain tissue that lines the inner surface of the eye, captures images of the visual world, and communicates them to the brain. continue reading here…

in Tarpaulin Sky!

Shira Dentz’s hybrid poetry/prose memoir, door of thin skins, opens on a scene with Dr. Abe in his “watering hole,” the New York penthouse apartment-turned-office where the 60-year-old psychotherapist sees city patients. Here, too, we are introduced to the poet’s remarkable eye as it surveys her surroundings: “art in a precise geometry along the walls like cut hedges around a house,” “black wooden masks, quick meadows, the slight and tarnished,” “[a] woman’s torso with flowing breasts, blue and gold, coat of thin skins” (3). Here is a room “fashioned according to Freud” and a poem cataloging objects of decor grouped around the towering totem of a capital
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in The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys:

DOOR OF THIN SKINS, poems by Shira Dentz (poems which as a sum (as a collection) is more than its parts (individual poems). Good example—an urgent motivation—as to why poetry should be more than verse. Novelistic in scope. Searing, thus moving in content. Ambitious and effectively so in form.)

PEPPER LUBOFF interviews me about door of thin skins in July’s OmniVerse (Omnidawn Publishing’s blog) here:

Check out the newest issue of DB’s review section including my audio interview with Cole Swensen here!

The 39 reviews presented here discuss 45 books and are in conversation with ongoing conversations both within and without the literary community at-large, such as those connected to boundaries, race and gender. The books discussed cover a wide aesthetic range, coming from both emerging and well-established authors.

Nin Andrews interviews me on CavanKerry Press’ blog about my new book, door of thin skins, here

Poet of the Month: Shira Dentz
April 2013

at Poetrynet.org: http://www.poetrynet.org/month/

Available online through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, & selected bookstores! Distributed by University Press of New England.
http://www.amazon.com/door-thin-skins-Emerging-Voices/dp/1933880368
http://www.cavankerrypress.org/emerging_sdentz_door.htmlhttp://www.upne.com/1933880365.html

A hybrid of poetry, prose, and visual elements, door of thin skins is a tale that unfolds in a psychotherapist’s and a state prosecutor’s office and the mind of the poet regarding it all–

door of thin skins is a perfect title for Shira Dentz’s latest work. In this fever dream of a book, Dentz’s language is like a spirit who can pass through the scrims of time and perspective, but not unscathed. These poems are the toll. She sings what fails to kill us. —Cornelius Eady

door of thin skins tracks the misuse of power in a patient/doctor relationship in shattering detail. A patient is cut off from her body and the doctor imposes his. Her senses have dispersed as if to escape the troubled site. In these poems, the experiences that tear the mind and the mind’s language must be recollected in language, which becomes a reenactment of the wounding. What the poet must do, and does, is let language be torn apart so that the senses (sense) may re-collect in beauty, in the body of the poem. —Eleni Sikelianos

Here is David as a 21-year-old confused girl in boyish clothes and Goliath as a golden-credentialed 60-year-old psychotherapist in orthopedic shoes who jeopardizes his career when he sexually crosses the line with his young patient, then continually questions the reality of her perceptions. Shira Dentz’s brilliant poetic amalgam of circumstance and the mind’s second-guessing, door of thin skins presents a contemporary David and Goliath tale that unfolds in a psychotherapist’s office, a state prosecutor’s office, and the crystalline mind of the poet regarding it all. Poetry itself becomes the slingshot in this face-off. The poet’s clever innovation of an edgy and oddball brand of avant-garde song-and-response tells this tale through a mix of thought, feeling, fact, history, and personal history and a riveting pastiche of rhythmical poetry, visual poetry and prose poetry. Dentz triumphs in her dazzling and fractured narrative; door of thin skins startles and astounds. —Molly Peacock

Shira Dentz’s door of thin skins is not only an intimate narrative of seduction and abuse, but a tour de force of assemblage. Each gallery-worthy page is meticulously arranged, prose overlain with lyric sequences, visual space with visual density. From every angle, door of thin skins is a chilling and exquisite document.
—Karen Brennan

Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, 12/13/12: “a woman all about love yesterday.” by Shira Dentz

& watch/read on Poem Flow!