Shira Dentz is the author of five full-length books including SISYPHUSINA (PANK, 2020), and two chapbooks. Her poetry, prose, visual and cross-genre writing appear widely in venues such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, New American Writing, Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series (Poets.org), and NPR. She's 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. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Shira holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah, and is Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky.

Other poems by Shira Dentz in Verse Daily:
July 21, 2020:   "Casual wind" "like ghosts late and lonely to the touch..."
March 16, 2020:   "Let the possum go" "i like thoreau because i like the nature crackling soon am going to be too tired for anything...."
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 Sisyphusina:

"Sisyphusina is a gathering of the abundance and burden of gatherings, of remembrance, of the life that we are told to both carry and live. Shira Dentz examines the unravelings of age, the signs of having been in the world, and when these begin to show on the body. She writes that 'belonging is form.' When one doesn't belong, the world shifts, and its forms shatter. In stunning poetic displays of language, this collection illuminates this shattering, displays it in its very many brilliant, lapidarian, explosive, and heartbreaking forms."
—Jenny Boully

"With Sisyphusina, Shira Dentz tunes her eyes micro- and macroscopically to the fine details and patterns of animal behavior. Dentz is acutely aware of the animal that is a human body, in this case, a woman's aging body, but also how the adaptive behaviors of earlier historical moments (such as the Egyptians dying even the hair of the dead) and of flounders and sharks converge into a mass of shared understanding about beauty and existence. This is a calmly anxious book, playful, confident, and exploratory in its textures and experiments with text and form. Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein are shades throughout these pages filled with shells, skin, and suits. We are reminded of the privilege of good vision, and it is a gift to behold the visual art, photographs, and drawings weaving throughout the book. Sisyphusina is a multi-media tour de force, an unforgettable one."
—Diana Khoi Nguyen

"Even if I weren't caught up in the inspiring words of Shira Dentz, which I am, I would be swept along through her remarkable new book, Sisyphusina, by the shapes and textures of her verses, by the graphic surprises (and anticipation) from page to page, by her well-timed typographical idiosyncrasies, and by her perfectly calibrated spaces – around, below, above, and between the areas of text. I fell in love with the way 'the very eye of night' shared two pages with a graph of dots which became snowflakes (asterisks) which became dots again, cued by her words and by a small perpendicularly arranged message: 'thisiskin.'"
—Kay Rosen

"It happens to anyone who lives past youth; but contra such redundancy of aging, 'beauty blossoms wisps' in Shira Dentz's Sisyphusina. Utterly unpredictable and present to the potential in a next formal possibility, Dentz's poems, images, and astute notations are appearances of generosity, feminist honesty, and wit."
—Carla Harryman

"With language in play and at play, Sisyphusina exploits the resources of poetry to draw a wide canvas that embraces the quotidien, the sensuousness of nature and the fluidity of dream worlds, all interrupted and, at times, heightened by the visual. Dentz pays the ultimate respect to her readers in allowing them follow the skein of poetry, even as the borderlands between thought and expression are effaced, erased even. Slippery and evanescent, Sisyphusina is about how poetry allows us to founder and flounder through the certain uncertainty of life to transform the dross of the ordinary and the everyday into the marvelous."
—M. NourbeSe Philip