Black Milk

by Tory Dent

Overview

Tory Dent's previous books include What Silence Equals (Persea Books, 1993) and HIV, Mon Amour (Sheep Meadow Press, 1999), which was awarded the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award and Eric Mathieu King Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

She is a John Simon Guggeinheim Fellow for 2005 and has received fellowships and grants from the Library of Congress/Witter Bynner, the Whiting Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the PEN organization.

Her poems have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Agni, Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Lyric, Pequod, Ploughshares and many others. Her poetry has also been anthologized widely, and her art criticism has been published in Parachute, Flash Art and other journals and catalogs.

Tory Dent graduated from Barnard College in English Literature and received an MA from New York University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781931357265
Publisher:	Sheep Meadow Press, The
Publication date:	11/07/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

TORY DENT, winner of the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a finalist in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the National Poetry Series, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and the Walt Whitman Award. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, and three PEN grants for Writers with AIDS. Her previous Sheep Meadow Press boook of poetry was HIV, Mon Amour (1999).

What People are Saying About This

Calvin Bedient

". . . There has never been a poetry quite like this before, so passionately and understandably barbaric . . . And, withal, stormily beautiful, at the border where beauty tolerates the sublime."

Marilyn Hacker

"Tory Dent's second book establishes her as a necessary, unparalleled voice in American writing. She takes the Whitmanian line, soars and plummets with it to the heights and depths of extremity. Speaking from the interior of a consciousness immutably transformed by AIDS, our millennial plague, she enunciates and elucidates all human despair, in a language elegant and extravagant enough to become, in itself, a kind of redemption."

Editorial Reviews

"There has never been a poetry quite like this before, so passionately and understandably barbaric . . . And, withal, stormily beautiful, at the border where beauty tolerates the sublime."—Calvin Bedient, Parnassus

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From the Publisher

Dent won much attention (and several prizes) for HIV, Mon Amour (2000), a fiery, unrelenting and detailed verse account of her struggles with the AIDS virus. This harrowing follow-up portrays her tumultuous years of treatment and survival, years of shocking depression, anger and other emotional extremes. "My beliefs, blood-sucking shadows,/ perpetuate themselves paradoxically by virtue of their nihilism," she explains, evoking in a later poem "that vortex, carnivorous, giddy, the death hole/ of my impending diminishingment." The eponymous set of 35 linked lyric poems explores her resentments and deepest terrors, taking its form from Renaissance sonnet sequences and its title from Paul Celan: other works weave Dent's own verse commentary around borrowed lines and whole poems by Celan, Plath, Rilke, Donne, G.M. Hopkins and Mallarm . Dent's fast-moving long-lined works-negative odes or anti-psalms, perhaps-explore fatigue, survivor guilt, existential despair and self-hate, "agony silenced as if never having existed," mixing biblical denunciations with medical and academic terms ("like consumer to capitalist fetish-object"). The New York poet makes clear in her shorter works her gratitude to her husband and her sense of responsibility to other people with HIV and AIDS, in the U.S. and abroad. At the same time, the poems remain explosive documents of her particular suffering, asking us to imagine ourselves in her place, while knowing that most of us cannot: "For seventeen years," a pantoum says, "I've said `I won't live another year.' " (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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