Imported Poems by Diana Adams

“Like the hidden v in a fox / or melodies that empty / out of a can,” Diana Adams’ poems take us through the interstices we think we occupy, revealing how we have not fully inhabited them yet. Imported from places where logic is hand-sewn, these vistas engage story engage hope engage what ifs “where words come / & go as smoke” and “the purpose of this exercise is to be lost.” I’m glad to be found, in part, by this poet’s words.

—Amy King’s latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize winner. King is the recipient of the 2015 Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award and is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.

Diana Adams offers up moments of a life dressed in understated, quasi-surreal clothing. She calls upon deep pools of the imagination to render poems that proceed not chronologically or logically, from cause to effect, but rather, by enigmatic and startling images that unwrap the pleasures of discovered connections, as when we look at a surrealist painting, with its congealed dreamscapes. Laconic on the page, Diana Adams elongates moment in between lines. It’s as though they had downed one of Alice’s pills, enlarging somehow into startling significance. When we say that we adore poems for their ability to summon strangeness from what had seemed ordinary, this is what we mean. This is in every sense virtuosic work.

—Jeffrey Levine is the author of three books of poetry: The Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered, forthcoming from Salmon Press (March, 2019), Rumor of Cortez, nominated for a 2006 Los Angeles Times Literary Award in Poetry. Levine is Founder, Artistic Director, and Publisher of Tupelo Press,

Moments wander through exits in Diana Adams’s Imported Poems, filled with characters from novels, theater people, librarians, mirrors, quicksand. It’s an intriguing, mysterious wandering Adams leads us through, equal parts danger and humor, as we’re embroiled in these things happening, as “the dead are watching / through the walls”. It’s both true and unresolvable, this interplay of questions and actions that sway through these poems where nothing is stationary. It’s an important reminder to watch out for, delightfully and meditatively rendered, a back and forth journey not quickly forgotten.

—John Gallaher is the author of Brand New Spacesuit, forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2020, Map of the Folded World (University of Akron Press, 2009) and The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way Books, 2007), which won the Levis Poetry Prize.

Diana S. Adams is an Edmonton, Alberta based writer with work published in a variety of journals including Fence, Queen Mobs, Boston Review, Drunken Boat, Fogged Clarity, Poets and Artists, The Laurel Review, and Ekleksogaphia. Her third book of poetry, Hello Ice, was published by BlazeVOX Books. Lights on the Way Out was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. BlazeVOX Books published her novella, To The River. Diana has three poems in Best American Experimental Writing 2016.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 84 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-353-9

$16

Imported Poems by Diana Ada… by BlazeVOX [books]