Chelsea Dingman
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chelsdingman.bsky.social
Chelsea Dingman
@chelsdingman.bsky.social
1.3K followers 1.2K following 120 posts
Author of Thaw (@ugapress 2017 National Poetry Series) Through a Small Ghost (@ugapress 2020) I, Divided (@lsupress 2023) PhD Candidate @ualberta Poetry editor @sweetliterary
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Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
glasspoetry.bsky.social
Advanced praise for Opening by Stefanie Kirby (@msstefaniekirby.bsky.social) by Chelsea Ding an (@chelsdingman.bsky.social) and Sara Moore Wagner (@saramoorewagner.bsky.social)!

www.glass-poetry.com
"Stefanie Kirby's chapbook, Opening, will open you like 'a highway,' 'a window,' 'a second mouth / filled with birds,' a cracked landscape. Kirby directly confronts the strange irony of living in a body which 'gives birth to death,' the uncanny after-reality of miscarriage. This is a transformational unfurling through and past the body. Kirby blends the body with the living world until the pain of being alive after a loss sits somewhere in the chest. In these vivid, surreal, and often fabulist poems, 'Drought brings up / shipwrecks like a body emptying itself / of bones.' Every poem aches and burns. 'Mary Magdalene turns / to smoke, bones soft / as incense.' Kirby, a master of the surreal, continually writes the wombed body in revolutionary and enchanting ways. Opening left me open to the bone." — Sara Moore Wagner, author of Lady Wing Shot "Stefanie Kirby's Opening speaks unsentimentally to the horror and grief related to miscarriage and stillbirth, instead reveling in the almost-fantastical rituals of the mind and body undergoing such experiences. Each poem is locked in its tiny little box, as if the poem is one place that even absence might not escape. Under pressures of form, Kirby's vivid and sensuous descriptions of loss and longing are even more haunting for what they cannot control. The tension between the living and the dead, thin as a uterine wall. In the 'smaller field' of a poem, unlike that of the body, 'there's no limit to all / it can hold.' A poem can never be emptied, though it too is inhabited by the deaths it births. How else to attend to the memory of that which has little trace? The brevity of Kirby's collection thus brilliantly reflects the brevity of a life unlived. Each poem, brief as a breath, and as wondrous." — Chelsea Dingman, author of Through a Small Ghost
January 11, 2026 at 10:03 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Thank you!
November 18, 2025 at 3:54 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
❤️🙏
November 17, 2025 at 4:24 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Thank you, Pat! 💜
November 17, 2025 at 4:23 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
❤️
November 15, 2025 at 3:14 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
davidnaimon.bsky.social
the transcript is up for the conversation with Diana Arterian: tinhouse.com/transcript/b...
Between the Covers Diana Arterian Interview - Tin House
David Naimon: Today’s episode is brought to you by Heather Clark’s The Scrapbook. This debut novel from Clark is the story of an intense first love haunted by history and family memory. Inspired by th...
tinhouse.com
October 19, 2025 at 10:53 PM