Diaz, Joanne: Electric Dress

Electric Dress provides a broad range of explorations of personal, political and cultural materials. The poems cross a number of landscapes—taking the reader from Hong Kong to Spain to the Philippines to Central Illinois. They insist on the ways in which we are tied to history and to our landscapes, often drawing upon archival materials and visual art objects in order to provide meditations on what we inherit and what we wish to disavow. If instructors are looking to adopt a collection of poems for their beginning or advanced poetry workshops, I hope that they will consider Electric Dress for its variety and complexity.

Joanne Diaz is the author of The Lessons (winner of the Gerald Cable First Book Award from Silverfish Review Press) and My Favorite Tyrants (winner of the Brittingham Award from the University of Wisconsin Press). With Ian Morris, she is the co-editor of The Little Magazine in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press), and she is the co-host, with Abram Van Engen, of the Poetry for All podcast. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she has also received fellowships from Ragdale and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is the Isaac Funk Endowed Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.