Shira Dentz’s third full-length book, how do i net thee, is just out from Salmon Poetry. More info about the book can be found at http://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=453&a=320 and www.shiradentz.com. The book is available for purchase online including at Amazon and in stock at various independent bookstores.
Shira Dentz is the author of five full-length books, black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman), door of thin skins (CavanKerry), how do i net thee (Salmon Poetry), the sun a blazing zero (Lavender Ink/Diáologos, forthcoming 2019), and Sisyphusina (PANK, forthcoming 2020), and two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Shearsman), and FLOUNDERS (Essay Press). Interviews with her have appeared in journals including Ploughshares and The Rumpus, and her writing appears widely in journals including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, and Western Humanities Review, and has featured at The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, National Public Radio, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. she’s 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.
Before returning to school for gradute studies, she worked as a typesetter and graphic artist mainly in the music industry. A graduate of the Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, I have a doctorate in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah. I was Drunken Boat‘s Reviews Editor from 2011-2016, and am currently Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky. I teach creative writing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. More about my writing can be found at shiradentz.com.
how do I net thee is a diagram of a voice drawn through lyric, visual, and prose poems threading schisms within a family, within a society brutalized by racial tensions, and within the space crossed in the transition from fertility to its loss.
how do i net thee asks Shira Dentz in her brilliant new book. Cast across the turbulent sea of language, these poems bring back to us a medley of phrases, voices that capture an ecstatic, coruscating world of trauma, loss & retrieval. Here is the “Book of Anger in the shape of a dog” ; a vagin a with “three white waterfalls” ; “the heel of an echo” that soars “on falcon wings”. Following in the footsteps of her great precursors, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich, Dentz’s luminous poems reveal to us “a woman’s secret language” from “a mouth inside herself”. Read them! –L.S. Asekoff
Language whips around wildly but wisely in Shira Dentz’s latest collection. Seamlessly blending the vernacular with the erudite, she echoes her dynamic phrasings with dynamic typography, and yet what accrues, above all, throughout the book is a sense of her profound engagement with the world. The book is aloft by principle, and alive with it. –Cole Swenson.
