"[O]ne / writes a journal // to create the / guise of reading / creation. // It's all already / not there!," writes Dot Devota in her newest collection of explosive, visionary rage-songs sung in the private-public space of a journal toward the public-private space of "community." PMS: A JOURNAL IN VERSE is a radical rejection of artistic perfection and false relationship; a record of the mind's neon blaze, flickering light upon such underworldly irritants as brost psychosis, compulsive self-reflection, failed artistic support structures, and literary theory. This is a formidable, darkly humorous collection fueled by the intelligence of an electric, revelatory state.
"Dot Devota's PMS: A JOURNAL IN VERSE gives 'birth to myself' through rage, through resistance, through excruciating insistence on attention itself. Like a hand-held camera set to time-lapse over the course of a lifetime, Devota's 'terrestrial arcade' directs us to the difficult--perhaps impossible--experience of living through that which has not yet been contextualized. This collection is a vivid interrogation of language in the midst of a crisis with no center. Devota acts as oracle, our 'orphan of reality,' coming back from the trance to admit, 'There is no home / in time.' Both tender and furious, PMS dis/orients, allows death, and reconsiders the terms on which we might now live."--Candice Wuehle
"Intimately peregrine and psychologically perennial, Dot Devota dotted our gaze with the broad brushstroke of her eloquent, casual cogitation. Her bold--brightly captivating poetry is an act of oppression against insomnia, suicide, abuser, victim blaming, writing, murder, rape, Alice Notley. Here her casual acute language finds the foreign country in the familiar. Each of her fluid, caged ache is a shard that impales the unveiled anguish of her very public contemplation, which is made private through the convex mirror of her interrogated resistance. PMS: A JOURNAL IN VERSE is a cat--always so ready to defenestrate itself out of limousine of convulsion--only to tenderly tiptoe its paws back into the languishing intellectual rickshaw of her compassion. It is a superoriginal collection, born to deny inequity of its aggressive beauty."--Vi Khi Nao
"A clear thing to say about Dot Devota's PMS: A JOURNAL IN VERSE is that it is incredible / incredible jewel incredible / jewel violence is not a choice / and sometimes is not an event / / / but a surrounding the force pressed against / the life of femme-ness / a stuckness / the writing the life thrives against / scars of water / waves? It comes toward you in incredible waves / like light you move through incredible jewel / fragmentation is often talked about as loss of self / time / space / but IT IS a sharpness a stickiness a burr / here a willingness to find a way / to hold it / to be present as / femme-ness / Dot in the desert which is the page is the desert / sometimes violence is an event no one will face / the book holds it / all out of care out of spite a force / 'I'm a poet / poets don't write books of poetry / this is a book' / incredible to have been there / to be there / with this book / incredible jewel."--Carrie Lorig
Poetry.
The poet Dot Devota is the author of THE DIVISION OF LABOR (Rescue Press, 2015), AND THE GIRLS WORRIED TERRIBLY (Noemi Press, 2014), The Eternal Wall (Book*hug), and Dept. of Posthumous Letters (Argos Books).
