Dickey, Melissa: Ordinary Entanglement

Cleveland State University Poetry Center, paperback

Publication Date: October 10, 2023

Publisher Marketing:

“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