Maggie Dietz – författare

Prayer to a Suicide - Brother, when they laid you down I touched the break in lashes where the chicken pox had blown the lid up long ago, small brushes that stroked out your seeing hours. I wish the clouds would wash us down with unrepentant power, that pounding rain would soak in to your newly opened grave. Our mother's breath is broken, her C scar tingles after many years. Our father has not spoken. All night the faucet drives hard tears down into the silent house. They say it is beyond repair. Wherever you are, cry for us. At the heart of this unusually accomplished and affecting first book of poetry is the idea of the hinge - the point of connection, of openings and closings. Maggie Dietz situates herself in the laminal present, bringing together past and future, dream and waking, death and life. Formally exact, rigorous, and tough, these poems accept no easy answers or equations. Dietz creates a world alive with detail and populated with the everyday and strange: amusement-park horses named Virgil and Sisyphus, squirrels hanging over tree branches "like fish."By turns humorous and pained, direct and mysterious, elegiac and elegant, the poems trace for us the journey and persistence of the spirit toward and through its "perennial fall" - both the season and the human condition. Cumulatively, the work moves toward a fragile transcendence, surrendering to difficulty, splendor, and strangeness.

October AubadeIf I slept too long, forgive me.A north wind quickened the window framesso the room pitched like a moving trainand the pillow’s whiff of hickoryand shaving soap conjured your bodybeside me. So I slept in the berthas the train chuffed on, unburdenedby waking’s cold water, ignorantof pain, estrangement, hunger and      the crucial fuel the boiler burned  to keep the minutes’ pistons churningwhile I slept. Forgive me.That Kind of Happy, the long-awaited second collection by award-winning poet Maggie Dietz, explores the sharp, profound tension between a disquieted inner life and quotidian experience. Central to the book are poems that take up two major life events: becoming a mother and losing a father within a short stretch of time. Here, at the intersection of joy and grief, of persistence and attrition, Dietz wrestles with the questions posed by such conflicting experiences, revealing a mind suspicious of quick fixes and dissatisfied with easy answers. The result is a book as anguished as it is distinguished.