DAWN TEFFT
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ONCE UPON A RIOT
Once Upon a Riot insists upon the necessity of resisting forms of oppression such as fascism and economic exploitation, while exploring both the challenges and the moments of beauty in raising a young child in our current political moment. Children and movements are both birthed, and the poet is always attuned to the music of the experience: lyrical, prosaic, experimental, narrative. The book traverses street protests often pejoratively labeled as riots by commercial media, labor strikes, playing at the beach, decorating apartments, LED light displays on bridges, James Baldwin, Taylor Swift, the Wisconsin Uprising, the film Poor Things, scraped knees, the French revolution, immigrant rights, a mother’s circumstances raising a child in the present, a mother’s own childhood, and global happenings. All is context. All is fodder for shaping what is and what is to come.
GOSLING
With Ryan Gosling's childhood and his various acting roles as a focal point, Dawn Tefft plunges into the machinery of spectacle culture and surfaces with a beautiful critique of the falsehood of a fixed self, particularly as it expands and contracts under the pressure of consuming and being consumed. The persona poems Tefft deftly sequences might be read as Gosling's multiple selves, which conspire to blur the line between the real and the performed real and arrive at a more accurate, more pluralized sense of gender, class and personhood. Few writers have the courage and the craft to balance shrewd observation with profound empathy toward their subject matter, but that's exactly what permeates these poems and what webs them together so brilliantly. —Paul Martinez Pompa, author of My Kill Adore Him
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FIST
Fist explores how power is used to oppress as well as to resist oppression. The poems in this chapbook get up close to moments of transformation, mining the details for what we can learn about systems and the people who act in, on, through, and against them. The poems are often fierce, but spring from an understanding of strength as rooted in vulnerability.
FIELD TRIP TO MY MOTHER AND OTHER EXOTIC LOCATIONS
Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations is a free e-chapbook of short lyric poems asking how the speaker's mother wound up, and continued to survive, in harsh conditions, moving through economics, literature, science and history in pursuit of an answer.