Poets Cass Donish and Melissa Dickey will read from their latest books; Your Dazzling Death and Ordinary Entanglement.
Cass Donish will read from Your Dazzling Death. “An elegy is a conversation that never ends. As if death didn’t exist. As if speech isn’t sometimes silence. As if poetry isn’t often the little that’s left. These poems—brilliant, devastating—are evidence that a woman was once alive, and loved, and that that, the all of it, is now equally over and not over: a complicated truth that gives rise to both excruciating pain and mitigating consolation.” —Mary Jo Bang

Melissa Dickey will read from Ordinary Entanglement, published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in October 2023. “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

Cass Donish is a queer poet and writer born and raised in the Greater Los Angeles Area. They are the author of the poetry collections The Year of the Femme (2019), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; and Beautyberry (2018). Their nonfic­tion chapbook, On the Mezzanine (2019), was chosen by Maggie Nelson as winner of the Gold Line Press Chapbook Competition. Their work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Guernica, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, VICE, and elsewhere. Donish received an MA in cultural geography from the University of Oregon, an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri. They live in Columbia, Missouri.

Melissa Dickey is the author of two previous books of poetry from Rescue Press — Dragons (2016) and The Lily Will (2011). Her poetry and essays have appeared in Bennington Review, Interim, Puerto del Sol, jubilat, New Orleans Review, Bayou Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, Laurel Review, and the anthology The Anatomy of Silence. She has received fellowships from the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the James A. Michener Center for Writers, and the Iowa Board of Regents. In 2023, she received scholarships to be a writer-in-residence at Craigardan Art Center in the Adirondacks and at Hypatia-in-the-Woods, a retreat on the Olympic Peninsula. A graduate of the University of Washington and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she currently lives in Western Massachusetts with her partner and their four children. She teaches literature and writing at an independent high school.