Dog Girl

Heidi Lynn Staples

The truth and beauty welcomed in Dog Girl is that nothing lasts, nothing is complete, and nothing is perfect. Staples continues the Joycean, Steinian and even Shakespearean wordplay evident in her first book, channeling it through a dizzying collection of formal structures—“Janimerick” through “Decemblank,” with haiku, sonnets, prose poems, nursery rhyme, and more. She draws her explicit subject matter from her own passionate marriage, her profound engagement with the nonhuman world, and a core-deep grief from a late-term pregnancy loss. Elliptical phrasing, puns, and formal inventions enact a speaker grappling with the limits of language but finding no other way to express her emotions’ extremity. Equipped with the best ear since John Berryman, Heidi Lynn Staples continues to plumb poetry’s ability to awake us to new ways of knowing.

“Of the language-powered poets on the poetic landscape, Heidi Lynn Staples is one of the only ones whose heart powers the machine. To quote Franz Wright, she's more fun than a topless rodeo.” —Mary Karr

“In Dog Girl, Heidi Lynn Staples dances on a tightrope strung between sense and nonsense, between adulthood and childhood, and the lyricism of her verbal acrobatics confounds and delights in the way only genuine poetry can. Staples takes the existing lexicon and wrenches words into position, then commands them to be other than what they were, much to the joy of her astonished reader.” —Christopher Kennedy

“Intricate maps of image, comedy, pain. Delicate juxtapositions. Balancing acts (axe). Heidi Lynn Staples writes a dogged poem. Words walk to a reader from unexpected corners, original places. Vibrant. Sustenance.” —Michael Burkard