Theater of the Tongue by Diana Adams

“Yoke me to a waterfall” and just try to keep me from the poems that call out from the   THEATERS OF THE TONGUE.   Diana Adams gathers the inexplicable from farm animals and gardens, theaters and rivers, culture and the professions, time and her staircases, walking us through this planet’s Vena Cava with “Death’s guest” in a carefully-carved effort to show us another way, her way, rich with human cells, “earthsmells” and “air’s soft sugar” until we too melt into her paged complexities, nodding an innate yes to the sense that steals us from the security of the simple into views blooming in uncertainty and pregnant.

“Fundamentally, we need diversity, we need others because it pleases
us, awakens our senses and the senses are life.” –Segalen

—Amy King, author of I’m The Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi

Diana Adams book, Theaters of the Tongue , gives the reader a fascinating canvas of words, some words best described as word food. The reader is treated to lines like “salmon are lead by bells inside.” Then Adams playfully and sympathetically reshapes Frankenstein into a post-modern monster “un Shelley’d “ by the poet. Her vision is earthy, horrific, and mystical; her language, crisp and visual as though a visual artist had rewritten her vision into a poetry. When I read a book of poetry as fascinating and well crafted as Theaters of the Tongue , I feel as though I have received a insights into an imaginative universe, reconstructed for the mind and the Word—and indeed I have.

—Mary Kasimor author of silk string arias and A Pure Bowl of Nothing

The title of this brilliant book by Diana Adams points simultaneously at her commitment to the senses and to language.. Her poems are filled with imagery of taste and smell, the most intimate of the senses. The reader has breakfast with Frankenstein and shares many other meals where the menu is rich and strange. At the same time, the poems stage such experiences in the theater of language, where every word has its dramatic role. The Joy of Cooking merges with The Joy of Speaking in a book destined to be as well-thumbed as a great cookbook.

— Bert Almon, winner of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Award for poetry in 1995 and 2008

Diana Adams is an Alberta based writer with work published  in a variety of journals The Laurel Review, MiPOesias, Shampoo, Pindeldyboz , Poemeleon,  Del Sol Review, Perihelion, Bayou, Apostrophe, and Spire. She is a poetry editor for Del Sol Review, and her first book of poetry ‘Cave Vitae’ was published this spring by Plain View Press.

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