"Veering - often within a single poem, often within a single line - from self-lacerating anger to desperation, from mordant satire of the confessional mode to stunned (and stunning) autobiography, from irreverence to a state of fearful silence, Leaf Weather is a 'chapbook' in no diminutive sense of the term. In 'peeling/away the sun,' Shira Dentz unlooses equal parts verbal anxiety, formal adventure, and emotional reckoning. It's one thing to write poems; it's quite another to live, as Dentz does, in the marrow of one's words." -Mark Levine "Imagine desire as a boscage, heady with its scents, untamed, infinite in its ability to sex and seed. This is the terrain Shira Dentz paints in her passionate Leaf Weather, a luminous canvas upon which each variation of color, each nuanced line, brings us ever closer to the garden of earthly delights. Like Emerson, Dentz pays homage to the sacred wood wherein songs are 'always new, like time itself, or like love.'" -D. A. Powell

Poetry. The poems in BLACK SEEDS ON A WHITE DISH spring from the search for what is generated and discovered when loss and desire occupy the same space. But lamentation is not the primary focus--by destabilizing everything in its reach, loss disables rigidity. These poems shift widely in form and tone, and seeds invoke the creative germ that spurs the metamorphoses occupying them: "Nothing to do but let the form of things take over." Shapes themselves, including punctuation, become a language throughout.