D.W. Baker

@lowermelody.bsky.social

submerging poet, dad, editor ~ place, bodies, belonging, the end of the world ~ masthead @VariantLit.bsky.social @PhillyChapbook.bsky.social ~ he/him ~ 🪐💀🏳️‍🌈🍃 https://www.dwbakerpoetry.com

Dillard’s style is often direct and vivid, but does not shy away from the abstract and surreal; he uses several techniques to defamiliarize quotidian detail—reminiscent of Charles Simic—that are well-matched to content. Perhaps the most striking example of this is a poem titled after an abstraction, “The Newness,” that is tightly composed around imagery of toilets. Dillard opens with a realist declarative sentence: “Sometimes you have to get rid of a toilet.” From there, he guides readers using a mixture of imaginative detail (“Do you know how easy a toilet shatters / under one sledgehammer swing?”) and carefully-enjambed revelation (“it’s like / when you died and, after, I broke / your life apart”), all of which culminate in a changed way of seeing:

Now when I go for walks I wonder
where a toilet would fit in. I wonder,
if you were here, what new place
you would pick to abandon.

I saw the pale spire of the lighthouse, vanishing softly out of the distant fog.
Surviving on blood oranges staining shaking hands red –
It had to be the first building after two weeks hiding in the waves.
Circling around, raising my eyes to rove the heights –

Surviving on blood oranges staining shaking hands red –
I quickly closed the distance and went headfirst through the dark space in the floor.
Circling around, raising my eyes to rove the heights –
Hands behind me pushed away – stairway slanting – air – into the gasping air –

I quickly closed the distance and went headfirst through the dark space in the floor.
They smiled first with greening eyes, then quietly pulled me under the surface.
Hands behind me pushed away – stairway slanting – air – into the gasping air –
I slowly sank deeper. Another bubble of breath escaped.

They smiled first with greening eyes, then quietly pulled me under the surface.
It had to be the first building after two weeks hiding in the waves.
I slowly sank deeper. Another bubble of breath escaped.
I saw the pale spire of the lighthouse, vanishing softly out of the distant fog.

$In the third section, “Mythogenesis,” Alter’s speaker offers poems that demonstrate rhythm as a tool for self-exploration. All three use her signature form of ten-syllable lines systematically broken both vertically (into couplets) and horizontally (by intentional use of space). Alter plainly describes this constraint in the book’s afterword: “I decided to approach material I’d been avoiding for much of my life by applying a simple formal constraint to most poems: ten-syllable lineation. By providing my mind with a rule and rhythm, I was able to articulate patterns that have haunted me since childhood” (31). One of the book’s most striking poems, “Chimera,” uses the mythological figure of a beast with mismatched parts to describe the conscious subject’s encounters with these hidden aspects of self: that chemical frontier fracturing me— memory and impulse exposed removed— synapses shaved somewhere unreachable—$