Two Poems:
"Huge Fragility"
"Luna"
from Tory Dent's
Black Milk

Tory Dent:

Tory Dent's previous books include What Silence Equals (Persea Books, 1993) and HIV, Mon Amour (Sheep Meadow Press, 1999), which was awarded the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award and Eric Mathieu King Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

She was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow for 2005 and received fellowships and grants from the Library of Congress/Witter Bynner, the Whiting Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the PEN organization.

When she died in December, 2005, she had been HIV-positive for 17 years. (Photo by Arne Svenson)

Black Milk

Praise for Tory Dent's HIV, Mon Amour

"Tory Dent's second book establishes her as a necessary, unparalleled voice in American writing. She takes the Whitmanian line, soars and plummets with it to the heights and depths of extremity. Speaking from the interior of a consciousness immutably transformed by AIDS, our millennial plague, she enunciates and elucidates all human despair, in a language elegant and extravagant enough to become, in itself, a kind of redemption."
— Marilyn Hacker

"'We might curb our mortal agonies,' writes Julia Kristeva, by 'naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it to its smallest components.' This describes Tory Dent's method but not its effect. Rather than restraining, Dent's lyrical excess harnesses – hijacks and rides out – suffering's untenable velocity. Dent's voice recalls Job's lamentation... but unquenchable desire in the face of physical dissolution is her most driven theme."
— Christina Pugh

"... There has never been a poetry quite like this before, so passionately and understandably barbaric... And, withal, stormily beautiful, at the borderline where beauty tolerates the sublime."
— Calvin Bedient

"Dent aims at love with point-blank range as easily as she returns HIV to its full social and political complexity, not just a ribbon worn by the fashionably healthy. Savage and searching, Dent's exhaustive line refuses the celebratory stance. We're reminded that language is as mechanical and inadequate as the body, that the narrator is alive and struggling to understand humanity's eventual predicament... Tory Dent's wail is a necessary song for the millennium's cusp."
— Melanie Figg

"Dent's philosophical poems turn disease's signification of the material and immaterial into a further metaphor for the fragile (im)materiality of all things aesthetic. Her syntax, diction, and overall intellectual thrust are so far in advance of the simple-mindedness that too often passes for American poetry these days that her poetry can, for the time being, transcend the question 'are they good?' But the violence of their intelligence also makes embarrassing attempts to praise these poems in reductive terms of wishy-washy impressionism. There are real ideas encoded within Dent's syntactical puzzles, ideas which may not be so easily reconciled."
— Andrew Grossman

"Stylistically one of the most daring books to be published in recent years, Dent's astonishing cri de coeur is also one of the most challenging... The lines pour out of her recklessly, as if she can barely contain herself and the knowledge that this may be her last chance. The entire book radiates with unrepressed life."
— Library Journal

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