Böcker av Shira Dentz

Winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize. SISYPHUSINA is a cross-genre collection of prose, poetry, visual art, and improvisatory music, centered on female aging. Faced with linguistic and literary traditions that lack rich vocabularies to describe female aging, Shira Dentz uses the hybrid form as an attempt to suture new language that reflects internal and physical processes that constitute a shifting identity. By deviating from formal classical construction, and using the recurring image of a rose, SISYPHUSINA circles around conventions of beauty, questioning traditional aesthetic values of continuity, coherence, and symmetry. Some of the book's images are drawn from separate multimedia collaborations between the author and composer Pauline Oliveros, artist Kathy High, and artist Kathline Carr. A musical composition improvised by Pauline Oliveros, based on one of her text scores, titled "Aging Music," is the book's coda, and readers can listen to it online by scanning a QR code inside the book. The interweaving of these collaborations with the author's voice and voices from other sources imbue this book with a porous texture, and reimagines the boundary of the book as a membrane.

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. These poems shift widely in form and tone, and seeds invoke the creative germ that spurs the metamorphoses occupying them.

A tale that unfolds in a psychotherapist's and a state prosecutor's office and the mind of the poet regarding it all

First issued in the USA by Tilt Press, this is the 2nd edition of Shira Dentz's debut chapbook, and makes a fascinating contrast to her first full-length collection, black seeds on a white dish (2010), also available from Shearsman.