Drunken Boat's new Reviews Editor, Shira Dentz was recently interviewed by The Rumpus

Shira Dentz is the author of black seeds on a white dish, nominated for the PEN/Osterweil Award 2011, a chapbook titled Leaf Weather, and door of thin skins, forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. Shira Dentz: Yes! I regard the visual aspects of all text as a construct in its etymology or definitions, along with various layers of referential meanings. Together with whatever else my poems are doing or are up to, they’re sites in which I probe language—they’re riffs in which I discover what I’m up to through language. In so doing, I take into consideration the whole body of a word, and punctuation is a sign with particular uses and therefore part of the text with which I am working. As a poem evolves, I take cues from what’s occurring on the page—a process that is not dissimilar to many poets’. In the particular poem you mention which has the line that I drew from for the book’s title, I wasn’t aware of the many uses/meanings of the apostrophe until I wrote one down in the context of developing this poem. Lo and behold (and I included this moment of awareness in my poem), as I deconstructed the apostrophe, per se, it became my poem.

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