door of thin skins

A hybrid of poetry, prose, and visual elements, door of thin skins is a tale that unfolds in a psychotherapist’s and a state prosecutor’s office and the mind of the poet regarding it all–door of thin skins deconstructs the nature of psychological power through a reconstruction akin to a psychological diorama. The book’s events, narrated by a young woman in psychotherapy, unfold in non-chronological sequence, and recurring phrases, images, and events unify and deepen the narrative whose formal construction mirrors the process of psychotherapy. As a patient-therapist relationship becomes dependent and sexual, resulting in a precarious blurring of boundaries, the text alternates between the straightforward and syntactically disjunctive. Visual poems contribute another layer towards enacting one of the book’s themes, a fracturing of the narrator’s sight and simultaneous and conflicting perceptions of reality. The book’s formal experimentation echoes and challenges Wittgenstein’s ”the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” In addition to its innovative poetics, this book, first published in 2013, is among the predecessors of the #MeToo movement’s voice.

door of thin skins has been favorably reviewed in many venues including American Book Review, Rain Taxi, Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Rattle, Cutbank, Diagram, OmniVerse, American Literary Review, HTML Giant, Tarpaulin Sky, Denver Quarterly, and Fourth Genre.

Shira Dentz is the author of two chapbooks and five books including Sisyphusina (PANK, 2020), door of thin skins, a cross-genre memoir (CavanKerry, 2013), and how do I net thee (Salmon Poetry), a National Poetry Series finalist. Her writing appears in many venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Iowa Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series (Poets.org), and NPR. A recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem Award, and Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, she is Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky and teaches in upstate NY. More about her writing can be found at www.shiradentz.com.

door of thin skins is a perfect title for Shira Dentz’s latest work. In this fever dream of a book, Dentz’s language is like a spirit who can pass through the scrims of time and perspective, but not unscathed. These poems are the toll. She sings what fails to kill us.
— Cornelius Eady

door of thin skins tracks the misuse of power in a patient/doctor relationship in shattering detail. A patient is cut off from her body and the doctor imposes his. Her senses have dispersed as if to escape the troubled site. In these poems, the experiences that tear the mind and the mind’s language must be recollected in language, which becomes a reenactment of the wounding. What the poet must do, and does, is let language be torn apart so that the senses (sense) may re-collect in beauty, in the body of the poem.
— Eleni Sikelianos

Here is David as a 21-year-old confused girl in boyish clothes and Goliath as a golden-credentialed 60-year-old psychotherapist in orthopedic shoes who jeopardizes his career when he sexually crosses the line with his young patient, then continually questions the reality of her perceptions. Shira Dentz’s brilliant poetic amalgam of circumstance and the mind’s second-guessing, door of thin skins presents a contemporary David and Goliath tale that unfolds in a psychotherapist’s office, a state prosecutor’s office, and the crystalline mind of the poet regarding it all. Poetry itself becomes the slingshot in this face-off. The poet’s clever innovation of an edgy and oddball brand of avant-garde song-and-response tells this tale through a mix of thought, feeling, fact, history, and personal history and a riveting pastiche of rhythmical poetry, visual poetry and prose poetry. Dentz triumphs in her dazzling and fractured narrative; door of thin skins startles and astounds.
— Molly Peacock

Shira Dentz’s door of thin skins is not only an intimate narrative of seduction and abuse, but a tour de force of assemblage. Each gallery-worthy page is meticulously arranged, prose overlain with lyric sequences, visual space with visual density. From every angle, door of thin skins is a chilling and exquisite document.
— Karen Brennan

Read an interview about the book by Nin Andrews here

Read an interview about the book by Pepper Luboff on OmniVerse at Omnidawn Publishing here

Eileen Tabios, the editor of Galatea Resurrects, blogs about door of thin skins here

Read a review at NewPages here

Read a review by Brenda Sieczkowski in Tarpaulin Sky here

Read a review by Sandy Florian in HTML Giant here

Read a review by Kay Cosgrove in Green Mountain Review here

Read a review by Nicole Sheets in Diagram New Michigan Press here

Read a review by Jane L. Carman in American Book Review, Sex Writing, edited by Cris Mazza here

Read a review by Ann Fisher-Wirth in Rattle  here

Read a review by Nicole Walker in The Rumpus here

Reviewed by Megan Burns in Rain Taxi

In Jill Magi’s imagined interdisciplinary course on violence and nonviolence

Reviewed by Eileen Tabios in Galatea Resurrects

Reviewed by Sima Rabinowitz in Galatea Resurrects

Reviewed by Michael McLane in Cutbank

Reviewed by Danielle Cadenza Deulen in Georgia Review

Reviewed by Aviya Kushner in Salamander

Reviewed in Chronogram‘s annual poetry roundup in its June 2014 issue here

Short-listed for Utah’s 13 Bytes Magazine Poetry Book Award

Reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling in American Literary Review

Reviewed by Marthe Reed in Denver Quarterly

Reviewed by Kathline Carr in Grab the Lapels

Reviewed by Holly Welker in Fourth Genre, Spring 2016

Reviewed by Zoran Rosko at his blog

April 2013
96 pp
Trade paper – 7.50 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-36-5