Shira Dentz - Black Seeds on a White Dish

Paperback, 90pp, 9x6ins
Download a PDF sampler from this book here.

Nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award from PEN's American Center.

The poems in black seeds on a white dish spring from the search for what is generated and discovered when loss and desire occupy the same space. But lamentation is not the primary focus — by destabilizing everything in its reach, loss disables rigidity. These poems shift widely in form and tone, and seeds invoke the creative germ that spurs the metamorphoses occupying them — "Nothing to do but let the form of things take over." Shapes themselves, including punctuation, become a language throughout.

"Paul Cézanne once quietly avowed 'I will astonish Paris with an apple.' And now I may, with quite an equal confidence, announce that Shira Dentz will astonish us all with the 'the curve of a melon,' 'a sunray diagonal' and 'pumpkin seeds.' Which is to say that here is a book to unstill all the still life images resting in our hearts. Shira Dentz is the most powerfully delicate poet I know." — Don Revell

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