ALISHA DIETZMAN at Books Inc. Alameda

ALISHA DIETZMAN at Books Inc. Alameda

Come join us for an exciting in-person event with Alisha Dietzman at Books Inc. in Alameda! Get ready to meet the author, hear about their latest poetry colleciton, Sweet Movie, and get your book signed. Don't miss out on this fantastic opportunity to connect with a talented writer. See you there!

A National Poetry Series winner selected by Victoria Chang, Sweet Movie confronts romantic and religious masochism to interrogate spiritual, sexual, and moral agency
Sweet Movie’s love poems and ekphrasis echo splintered versions of the same question: how do we navigate a world where the expectations of our performance—our presentation, our means of existence—are dictated by the viewers themselves?
Mirroring the uncertain, unstable tenor of Dušan Makavejev’s controversial avant-garde film Sweet Movie (1974), the voices in Sweet Movie are equal parts docile, feverish, and violent. This collection reimagines a feminist approach to religious masochism to explore the ways women are denied agency by both their faith communities and by outsiders.
Dietzman’s poems move through locations across Central Europe and the American South. Each new landscape informs the next: Memphis appears in Berlin in the form of a dead deer, and Southern syntax haunts an elegy for Gustavs Klucis.
The inspired poems from Sweet Movie use film and art to break open seeing. What results are deeply insightful and spacious poems of faith, displacement, and love. Perpetually observant, Sweet Movie guardedly but desperately consumes a world that has become unsettling and uncertain.

“A rich and thought-provoking collection. Poetry lovers and Dietzman fans will want to read these poems over and over again and can find something new to enjoy or admire each time.”
—Library Journal, Starred Review
“The poems in Sweet Movie are wrought with beauty and being in the world.”
—Victoria Chang, from the foreword
“‘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.”
—Quan Barry, author of Auction: Poems
“A taut and haunting book of love and faith when all around us hate and nihilism crowd in.”
—Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps
“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

Alisha Dietzman is the author of Sweet Movie (Beacon Press, 2023), selected for the 2022 National Poetry Series by Victoria Chang, and Slow Motion Something For No Reason (Factory Hollow Press, 2022), the editors’ choice selection for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She received her PhD in divinity with a focus on aesthetics and ethics from the University of St. Andrews, supported by a grant from the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Her creative work and criticism have also received support from the Rebecca Swift Foundation, the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her poetry has appeared or will appear in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, the Denver Quarterly, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

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