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