PRAISE FOR ORDINARY ENTANGLEMENT:

In Ordinary Entanglement, Melissa Dickey creates a shifty, self-questioning syntax, a consciousness searching for steady footing on a dying planet in a society beset with racism, economic inequality, and patriarchy. As readers, we too become webbed in these unspooling meditations that weigh pleasure and love for one’s own kin against our duty to not look away from suffering. “I felt happy wondered if happy // was okay to feel in the oceanic field / of the fucked world it’s dark lovely in here.” Even in the depths of doubt, Ordinary Entanglement sparks with moments of beauty, a child playing a toy saxophone, a blooming catalpa tree, the everyday miracles that serve as both ballast and buoy. EMILY PÉREZ

To read Ordinary Entanglement is to be driven forward by lines both measured and wild. The hero of these poems—mother, teenage daughter, lover—is “holding a rope,” an umbilical cord of sorts, tethering her to the world. But in Dickey’s long, rapturous poems, all is woven together to form a different sort of rope, one tied to a bucket and lowered down into a well. Sustaining waters, it turns out, are found in the ordinary and the extraordinary, in entanglement and differentiation. In the spirit of Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, Dickey attends to both what is happening on in the periphery and what is happening internally. This book knows that “everything possible stretched on the rim / [is] about to become whatever there is.” SASHA STEENSEN

Melissa Dickey’s poems sing in defiance—and perhaps celebration—of a slowly burning, ever spinning world. “A gauge,” the poet suggests, and indeed they offer not a fixed point so much as the lights in the aisle that will lead you in the event of an emergency to the nearest exit. Dickey does not deny the violence we inherit but offers a song to gird us against what else might come. Simply put, these lines shine. ABIGAIL CHABITNOY

Ordinary Entanglement is an inquiry into the perimeters of the self. This is a book of proximity: to violence, desire, oppression, messes, resilience, and restlessness. With candor, quiet philosophy, and a lyric disorientation that enacts the porousness of selfhood, these poems weigh the responsibilities and possibilities of being the main character in one’s own story. And they exist inside an essential human question—can interiority withstand the necessity/fact of being permeated, of permeating? SARA WAINSCOTT

In their restless appetite to love what is difficult, these searching poems refuse false binaries of chronicle versus critique, witness versus actor, the life of the body versus the life of the mind. With empathy and discernment, Dickey invites everything in, “awe to ember tether to slack,” as she explores what it means to be “a citizen of the world and also / this room.” Reading Ordinary Entanglement feels like coming upon a river coursing just at the upper limits of its banks: swift, swirling, and carrying so much with it as it furiously kisses the edge between chaos and control.  LISA OLSTEIN

BIO:

MELISSA DICKEY is the author of two previous books of poetry: Dragons and The Lily Will, and her poetry and essays have appeared in Bennington Review, New Orleans Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and the anthology The Anatomy of Silence, among other places. Born and raised in New Orleans, she currently lives in Western Massachusetts with her partner and their four children. She teaches literature and writing at an independent high school.

MORE INFO:

Excerpt from Cleveland Review of Books

2024 Mass Book Awards Poetry Honors