Sweet Movie

At our vertices: God.

Imagine the most terrible light.
I want to know if we will imagine

the same light.

Light illuminates the difference between believer and skeptic, between Riga and Memphis, between a sadomasochistic movie character and the fraught, magnetic you whose presence (“the thicket of you, / close, warm”) is palpable in Sweet Movie by Alisha Dietzman. The poet strains our screen-dominated world through language, leaving objects to stand in for narrative: “The lonely hairclips of an empress. Cherry liqueur / and a little theory. A bucket of rusting, / Soviet-era pins.”

“Love Poem without Light” begins straightforwardly—“I should write more about America and us naked in a river. // You called me a coward as you took off your clothes. / Not wanting to be a coward, I took off my clothes”—then modulates to an ardent strangeness:

We went to a bar and found three girls in dresses
drinking cokes. Even from a distance they were a certain

revelation. Their ankles so wonderful and cold,
yes, cold, in the slow-coming dark. It was a desert.

It’s as though each word has been rinsed cleaned before being put back in unexpected order.

Dietzman’s voice is so distinctive that her micro-erasures of John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” have him sounding like the author herself: “I am a little new land burn me,” or, “Yet dearly I love you, imprison me.”

Ekphrastic poems respond to paintings by Marlene Dumas, movies by Dušan Makavejev, and other source material:

I like careful. I like every word thought through,
like when Žižek shakes his hands in the video, says
it was some maybe probably genocide.
Careful maybe. Careful probably. Careful genocide.

The speaker’s appreciation for Žižek’s hesitation could be read as a statement of Dietzman’s own poetics. Each poem in this collection is like a speedboat at full throttle, simply vanishing when it ends.