Stet: Poems

(Paperback)

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A fascinating collection of serious and playful poems that tap the inventive possibilities of the anagram and other constraining forms In Stet, poet Dora Malech takes constraint as her catalyst and subject, exploring what it means to make or break a vow, to create art out of a life in flux, to reckon with the body's bounds, and to arrive at a pl

Reviews

"In Stet, Dora Malech adds a stiff dose of emotional urgency to formal experiment, finding in anagrams, erasures, and Oulipean constraints like the 'beautiful outlaw' a way to advance a continual re-interpretation of deeply felt content. . . . Malechs effort . . . foregrounds the beauty and power of what formand the willingness to follow it without knowing the end resultcan achieve."---Marcella Durand, Hyperallergic
"[Stet] is a package of dynamite that could go off at any momentcombustible words that separate and come together like a gorgeous debris. They tweak the page with hidden truths made of language and utterances that are puzzle solversbut what is the puzzle Perhaps dimensionality on the page that speaks only if you want it. . . . Some pages are electro-pop, some are written by a spirit animal, but Malechs got pipes, and by God they sing."---Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books
"The poems in Stet often contain a forward and backward movement enacted through language play. In [Malech's] use of anagrams and rhymes, her subtle transpositions of letters from one word to the next . . . she lays bare the process of figuring out what to tell and how to tell it, especially at times when language fails us most. . . . It is play with a purpose, because between the words and white space, 'Sometimes we step into something true.'"---Maya Phillips, American Poets
"In this collection, we see a poet playing with language, cavorting with words and meanings that continue cascading into something else, something new, always metamorphosizing. This sense of play has value: Malech demonstrates her love and admiration for language as she shares poems that are playful, that are musical, and that make us think about words as arrangements of symbols that we ultimately assign meaning to. These poems remind us that poems do not always have to have a clear narrative, and their value is not necessarily in their decipherability."---Despy Boutris, Gulf Coast Magazine
"[A] smart, at times pyrotechnic collectionshe structures many of her lines with anagramthat is, like all great poetry, a joy to read aloud."---Spencer Hupp, Sewanee Review
"I was half amazed, half inspired, fully captivated by Malechs form. Reading this book exposed me to a type of writing I hadnt considered before, one that sets its own boundaries and breaks them all within one poem."---Sarah Sham, Crashtest

Author Bio

Dora Malech is the author of two previous books of poetry, Say So and Shore Ordered Ocean. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, and many other publications. She is assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore.