Dick of the Dead

Rachel Loden

Dick of the Dead is an investigation into American sexual, political, and poetic consciousness, and at its eccentric heart lies the undead and uneasy 37th president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. Also sifting the evidence (or implicated in its findings) are J. Edgar Hoover, Sylvia Plath, Hugh Hefner, Wyatt Earp, Valerie Solanas, and Vladimir Putin, as well as an experimental subject in a pink tutu, a Finnish gravedigger, an exiled Anglo-Saxon poet, and an industrious gang of fairies.

Loden’s Nixon is never merely the consummate villain deplored by his critics nor the tragic visionary statesman acclaimed by his apologists. He is nearly a force of nature: throwing off his gravestone in the garden at Yorba Linda, calling up his troops, his family, and even his black and white cocker spaniel, he is ready to smash death by any means necessary, to beat back a sea of pretenders and retake Washington by storm.

Dick of the Dead is a whimsical and beguiling trip through the underworld of the American psyche, much funnier and ultimately much more serious than any one book of poems has a right to be.

“Few books of poetry have so perfectly rendered the suffering and emotional impoverishment this nation has endured since the presidency of Richard Nixon. Like no other poet now living, Rachel Loden articulates the twisted cultural imaginary and horror that arises from decades of sustained mass cultural delusion. She is Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History falling backward through televisions, across press room podiums, and into, one hopes, the canon—where she belongs. She is without doubt one of the greatest poets writing today.”—Gabriel Gudding

“Richard Nixon is much more than a political symbol for the mendacity of the GOP. With all of his contradictions, this war-mongering Quaker & intensely shy public figure, a man who always worked with the presumption that nobody ever liked him, is in many respects our most American of presidents. Rachel Loden works with Nixon the way Shakespeare worked with Lear, mining him for all of his many inner conflicts, using him to show us ourselves. Protest as we might—‘We are not a crook!’—Loden knows (and shows us) better.”—Ron Silliman

“Rachel Loden’s intelligently obsessive, darkly witty poems are a ‘serious pleasure.’ Politics and popular culture have no defense against her penetrating gaze, and yield their sad truths, their falseness, as if she possesses X-ray vision. I trust Loden’s take on our convoluted world, the glut of it: worthy of keen attention, however corrupt. Potent solace, poetry of her caliber.” —David Trinidad

“Rachel Loden's vision of American life is operatic—its singing is a kind of screaming. And its color, red, is simultaneously the red of ‘Red Scare’ and the phantasmagorical blood red of a Dario Argento movie in which there is no outside to the nightmare: the nightmare of the Spectacular State.” —Ange Mlinko