A Reading (a collection) by Beverly Dahlen

Description

Poetry/Literature   ISBN 978-1-946104-63-2   $27 US

The complete collection of all of the parts of the author’s life-poem, A Reading, one of the essential works of the late 20th & early 21st Century in American poetry.

Reading “it” — the unknown, the unconscious, the past, the language, woman — by the endless invention of “it.” A writing/a reading: a physical and mental labor to create the endless tissue and fissure of m editation, (one’s) time, place, mind, pulse; processual, resistant, desirous. A stunning, cunning, and canny, an uncanny work. — Rachel Blau DuPlessis

A Reading works from a difference Wittgenstein might have enjoyed: what does it feel like to try to articulate the shape of a structure from inside that structure? How does the speaking subject stained (scarred) by that structuration also stain it, or wander around among its furtive, or awkward, or suddenly sexy or beautiful by-ways? This poetry wanders, a little bemused, though no less startled. The stakes and the terrain can feel dauntingly large, the landscape, while difficult, also inviting.
Re-reading A Reading, the big structure, call it the name of the father, gets there before the poet gets started, and the poet knows it: “before that and before that. everything in a line. where it was broken into, the house. not the body [where the dreamer says “that’s not my mother,” says Freud, read “that’s my mother”] but still I could not see that it didn’t have a roof. then there was something to cry about.” Dahlen takes us repeatedly into what suddenly feels like the gift of contingency, the grain of some particular, into the question, as one zen koan has it, “what is this?” To which the right answer is just to fall down in praise and blessing. As these poems do. As we readers do.      — Tenney Nathanson

Beverly Dahlen is an American poet. Her first book, Out of the Third, was published by Momo’s Press in 1974. Two chapbooks, A Letter at Easter (1976) and The Egyptian Poems (1983) were followed by the publication of the first volume of A Reading: 1-7 (1985), a serial poem that continues to be in process. Since then, four more volumes of A Reading have appeared: A Reading 11-17 (1989), A Reading 8-10 (1992), A-Reading Spicier & Eighteen Sonnets (2004), and A Reading 18-20 (2008). Dahlen’s SOMETHING/NOTHING: Essays & Talks came out last year from Further Other Book Works, and Discerning Things is forthcoming this year from Oxeye Press. Dahlen earned her B.A. from Humbolt State University and continued her studies at San Francisco State. She was a co-founder, with Kathleen Fraser and Frances Jaffer, of the feminist poetics newsletter HOW(ever). She taught writing workshops in schools and at the City College of San Francisco. In 2011 she received a Small Press Traffic Lifetime Achievement Award and, in 2013, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists award. She lives in San Francisco.

This book has just been issued (Tuesday, October 6, 2026). It is currently available only by direct order from Chax Press. Within a few weeks it will also be available from our distributor, IPG Books, and other booksellers.