Sweet Movie

Praise

“Alisha Dietzman is a love poet for the twenty-first century, a fierce, devoted sensualist who feeds on aesthetic experience….Sweet Movie [is] a book on the run—from men, from religion, from family, from legacies of violence against women—and it wants you along for the ride. And it’s thrilling.”
—Katie Peterson, author of Life in a Field: Poems

“‘I didn’t expect the desert, its longform,’ writes Alisha Dietzman in her lustrous debut Sweet Movie, a collection centered around ekphrasis. TV, movies, the self, even art and religion, serve as mediums on which the speaker casts the light of consciousness in her search for meaning. Despite the spectrum of experience presented, this is a poetry that proves, ‘At our vertices: God.’”
—Quan Barry, author of Auction: Poems

“The scene opens to a person teetering on a high wire between two trees in a forest that used to be a city. Below, another person gathers a host of paintings that once hung in a museum that no longer exists in the city that used to be a city. That person looks up, knowing that civilization is over, knowing that they love that person on the high wire, and that something new is only just beginning. That’s the movie I would make of Sweet Movie—a taut and haunting book of love and faith when, all around us, hate and nihilism crowd in.”
—Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps

“The poems in Sweet Movie are wrought with beauty and being in the world.”
—Victoria Chang