Black Milk [Hardcover]

Tory Dent (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Dent won much attention (and several prizes) for HIV, Mon Amour (2000), a fiery, unrelenting and detailed verse account of her struggles with the AIDS virus. This harrowing follow-up portrays her tumultuous years of treatment and survival, years of shocking depression, anger and other emotional extremes. "My beliefs, blood-sucking shadows,/ perpetuate themselves paradoxically by virtue of their nihilism," she explains, evoking in a later poem "that vortex, carnivorous, giddy, the death hole/ of my impending diminishingment." The eponymous set of 35 linked lyric poems explores her resentments and deepest terrors, taking its form from Renaissance sonnet sequences and its title from Paul Celan: other works weave Dent's own verse commentary around borrowed lines and whole poems by Celan, Plath, Rilke, Donne, G.M. Hopkins and Mallarmé. Dent's fast-moving long-lined works—negative odes or anti-psalms, perhaps—explore fatigue, survivor guilt, existential despair and self-hate, "agony silenced as if never having existed," mixing biblical denunciations with medical and academic terms ("like consumer to capitalist fetish-object"). The New York poet makes clear in her shorter works her gratitude to her husband and her sense of responsibility to other people with HIV and AIDS, in the U.S. and abroad. At the same time, the poems remain explosive documents of her particular suffering, asking us to imagine ourselves in her place, while knowing that most of us cannot: "For seventeen years," a pantoum says, "I've said 'I won't live another year.' " (Nov.)
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Review

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Sheep Meadow; First edition. edition (November 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931357269
• ISBN-13: 978-1931357265
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,120,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Black Milk, I drink you at dawn, at morning: Dent's Masterpiece, August 1, 2009

By 

HyacinthGirl "H.G." - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Milk (Hardcover)

First off, if you haven't read Dent's "HIV, Mon Amour," DO IT! It's an EXTRAORDINARY book.

The poems here are furious, long (usually) and brilliantly rendered. She was even, I think, on the verge of another breakthrough in style ("Odes to Delayed Gratification") in which she erases punctuation and uses the appearance of fragmentation to actually give coherence to the words. Many of these poems demand rereading and consideration in terms of how good they are as poems--what you're struck with first is how intellectually and imagistically engaged she is. If you don't like big words, you won't like this poet. If you don't like thinking, this poet isn't for you (go read some John Ashbery or some Leslie Harrison). Sometimes she drops figurative language--in her self-relay race against time--to pursue a more prosaic line that can, admittedly, disappoint when this lady has so much power in her. But most of the poems here are so well-crafted you don't even notice the craft (as you do in poets like Natasha Trethewey). It's not easy to the move the heart AND the mind.

And Dent, without a doubt, does both. Masterfully.

Bravo.