through a small ghost – poems – Chelsea Dingman

through a small ghost
poems, Chelsea Dingman
The University of Georgia Press, 2020

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Chelsea Dingman is a poet who makes you feel as if you’ve entered the dream a little early. Otherness is something that happens to others, and pain hurts in two places at once. In through a small ghost, it is this meditative displacement that allows the work to both worship and curse the prolonged destiny of its sudden and devastating inheritance. Be it a projected disappearance or a vanishing root, Dingman identifies first the caller of the form that keeps us from so many shapes, and then the unreal form itself. As any breathing in this held verse might poke a hole in the haunting and send a smoke ring to show the fog how its wheels have come off, the poems keep their witness on the made from and made by, achieving not only something to be seen, but also something protected from watching. And in this protection are many spiritually assertive mercies, elegant and ruinous, gifts from reversal of which the most healing might be that when a thing goes, loss doesn’t always get there first.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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book is here

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thaw – poems – Chelsea Dingman

thaw
poems, Chelsea Dingman
University of Georgia Press, 2017

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To love snow is to admire water. Is to vanish twice. What touch Chelsea Dingman’s Thaw has gives disappearance a third act. The language here returns the ear and forms distance to the shape left by the soundless siren of the world’s slowest ambulance. Fathers leave early to chew the root of abandonment. Brothers clone themselves to play hide and seek. And mothers remain to curtain call skin. These poems story themselves in the staying power of travelogue, and are meticulous in their scrapbooking of absence. What’s more, with Dingman as both acolyte and guide, they invite loss to confront those it’s taken.

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reflection by Barton Smock

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book is here:
http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/thaw