Shira Dentz

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!

“Subterranean Fires”

Michael Peverett closely reads “Penmanship of Trees,” a poem in my book how do i net thee (Salmon Poetry), and places it within the context of my other books, including Sisyphusina (PANK Books), in his review at Intercapillary Space (based in the UK). You can read what he has to say here. And here’s an excerpt:

Shira Dentz is an author who willingly courts the term “hybrid”. She began as a graphic designer working in the music industry, and you can see that background in the remarkable care given to the presentation of how do i net thee; its jacket, title page, the intricate typesetting and visual layouts. Some of her other books, such as door of thin skins (2013, about psychological abuse) and Sisyphusina (2020, about women’s aging and beauty) intermix a lot of documentary and fictional prose. These books admit content in a way that much experimental poetry doesn’t; in other words, the kind of content we’re inclined to call “straightforward”, though the books themselves show how “straightforward” isn’t an adequate description.

“An early sandwich” and “Indoors, we watch the wind press against things”

You can read more about Sisyphusina in this feature at POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA :

Shira Dentz on “Sisyphusina”

POETRY TODAY: TRUST AND IDEALISM • Poetry Today features living poets answering questions about poetry and poetics.

You can read Ruben Quesada’s interview with me about Sisyphusina in Kenyon Review here

Here are two excerpts from Cody Stetzel’s review of Sisyphusina in Colorado Review:

What I admire about Sisyphusina is that whether through time, the self, or the image at work, there is an attempt at definition even if it is an untrustworthy definition. The willingness to tempt solution, I think, is a particularly innovative flourish throughout the work.

What we think is a total picture
is a series, an addition of parts.

&

In the end, Sisyphusina reminds me very much of the interpsychic demonstrations that Clarice Lispector offers, and the work brought me back to a quote from The Passion According to G.H.––“Give me your unknown hand, since life is hurting me, and I don’t know how to speak—.” That in all of its work is both the known and unknown hand, yearning for some form of assistance in creating the picture. Lispector would very much create a character whose realness startled her, and in this way I found Dentz’s written moments like in “Flounders,”

I seem to not want to explore my feeling now that she was
almost burning to the next room tearing up those papers.

to yield a refreshing innovation, almost burning, yielding nothing to the confining limitations of tradition, expectation, and a poetic world.

You can read the full review at Colorado Review here