Shore Ordered Ocean

Description

By turns playful and serious, the poems in Dora Malech's long-awaited second collection, Shore Ordered Ocean, revel in the inherent tensions and pleasures of sense, sound and syntax. Her poems reveal the resonance in the offhand utterance, seek the unexpected in aphorism and cliché, and tap into the paradoxical freedom of formality. This is an extraordinary collection of highly idiosyncratic work which explores place, politics, the body, love, art, and more. It is bound together by an urgent, physical and beguiling relationship with language itself.

"Dora Malech is a remarkably individual and assured poet, both funny and engaging... Malech's work seems naturally philosophical, shifting from a baby monitor to 'History' with an ease as unusual as it is welcome. Her collection, which concludes 'let us at least attempt / our impossibly / tiny lives', leaves me with a sense of possibilities for an exciting poet, who, unusually, could take off in various directions. I look forward to communications from her poetic after-life."
Alison Brackenbury, PNR

"... striking in its power of physical evocation, the language often being used with a Hopkins-like intensity and a fascinated (and fascinating) ear for the sounds of words, for the echoic patterning of consonants and vowels that makes for some remarkable effects... This is a talent well worth watching."
Acumen

Dora Malech's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, American Letters & Commentary, the Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, Best New Zealand Poems, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is the 2008-09 Teaching Fellow at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and was most recently a Writing Fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Centre in Umbertide, Italy in the summer of 2009.