Shira Dentz is the author of five books, black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman), door of thin skins (CavanKerry), a cross-genre memoir, how do I net thee (Salmon Poetry) a National Poetry Series finalist, the sun a blazing zero (Lavender Ink/Diálogos), and Sisyphusina (PANK Books, March 2020), and two chapbooks, FLOUNDERS (Essay Press) and Leaf Weather (Shearsman). Her poetry, prose, visual, and cross-genre writing appear in many venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, New American Writing, Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Series (Poets.org), and NPR. A recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets' Prize, Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poem Award, and Poetry Society of America's Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, she is Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky and teaches creative writing and literature at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate NY.

Other poems by Shira Dentz in Verse Daily:
August 23, 2018:   "The way a drop" "of shortening dissolves into batter..."
December 11, 2010:   "Spoke" "in the whirr of the tire..."

Books by Shira Dentz:

Other poems on the web by Shira Dentz:
"No one spoke"
"A serene fog of moons sprinkled with plums"
"Magical Realism"
Two poems
Two poems
"DOOR OF THIN SKINS"
Five poems
"Blue Sky"
Five poems
Three poems

Shira Dentz's Website.

About the sun a blazing zero:

"In these poems, we find 'a glint like an eye's: yolk yellow, crayon thick,' a sonic 'hue do' where senses intertwine and words lead one into the next breathlessly opening and opening again. Dentz's poems leave spaces agape, even in their sonic onrush, to allow for 'a question mark, which is by its space to be slept wafting.' Her porous poetics blankets the small and uncertain self in rich language that makes us more comfortable with loss, death, cold, and the unknown—those 'blazing zeroes' where uncertainty becomes palpable. "
—Amaranth Borsuk

"Encompassing our past and present in a flirtatious and exuberant display of lyric immediacy, Dentz stretches our textural engagement with memory and history — feminism, the Holocaust, gardens and animals with texts that read like improvisatory jazz fugues. A pleasure to read and to look at."
—Erica Baum

"If Emily Dickinson wants to 'Tell all the truth but tell it slant,' Shira Dentz wants 'the lines to open. to be jagged, smeared, and tilted.' That wish, expressed late in Dentz's new book, does not substitute forthe deed, but describesthe deed performed by the poetry that precedes it. the sun a blazing zerois full of jagged, smeared, and tilted lines, of poems 'open to the elements.'"
—H. L. Hix

"Welcoming the / crackling from one snap of think,' Shira Dentz's latest collection, the sun a blazing zero, leaps synaptically (and syntactically) from sensation to affect, from self to cosmos, and from heartbreak to wonder. Under a literary constellation composed of William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, Vito Acconci, and Susan Howe, this poet invites us to join her in 'building a house open to the elements.' The views from this exposed literary shelter are simply breathtaking. You can watch 'mountains / like flame, / only slower.' Those unaccustomed to the cold at such altitudes are invited to wrap themselves in 'mourning, the heaviest fabric.' Dentz shows us how to dwell in worlds far from home."
—Srikanth Chicu Reddy

"These fine-grained, loose-limbed poems stay lightly with the contact zone where senses meet day. The zone precipitates scenes and memories, hi-def images, half-words. Notation coalesces into sensate palmate structures, affective fractals, till moments wheel like murmurations. Blazing Zero is gestural, avid, and moving, multi-ways."
—Catherine Wagner