Tessera

Chelsea Dingman

@chelsdingman.bsky.social

Author of Thaw (@ugapress National Poetry Series) Through a Small Ghost (@ugapress 2020) I, Divided (@lsupress 2023) PhD/Assistant Lecturer @ualberta Postdoctoral Fellow @SSHRC Poetry editor @sweetliterary

138 Posts1412 Follower 1270 Folgt

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · last mo.

My new poem in the summer issue of @triquarterlymag.bsky.social with thx to the editors!

A Question of Archives
Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive, Derrida says.
As when I had a child atter miscarrying, 1 began to see my fathe: everywhere. The deer he'd shot in the woods the winter before he died
My mind, Decembering the snow, the sun, the cold.
A four-day-long migraine.
The strange unabsence that is also unpresence. A shadow tense: the winter trees.
Too often lately, I sleep on the bathroom floor. Hormones laced with swords. All ridding riddled with sweat and nausea and pain.
My father, crving in my sleep as we sit in a truck near an outdoor pooll Neither of us speaks or moves. Night, like memory, yields to time.
It time is our greatest currency, that I might rearrange the past as the lodgepole pines rearrange the surface of water.
ly father, crying near the woods instead. The trees' shadows, kneelin a the blood of a dees
I he lost object is not an object at all, according to Lacan.
A dead man, a miscarriage. Lost addresses. Tell me again how anxiety has no object?
How contagious our despair. The Werther Effect: the friend before me, the one after. We were only children. Unlike water, the pines. My long attachments.
Still, I don't know how to endure. I don't know how not to.
The historical truth vs. the material truth. Certain pasts will disappear within and without language, our only witness.
My father, crying in the open field of my mind. Unable to find his way home.
Adorno insists that the living rescue the dead through memory.
I am my father's murderer. I am my father's savior. I am neither
Say child in place of father.
What is a truth if not a wish
to be held
"he way my father carried himself through the world. The way he carried m when I could still be carried. The way a river carries-
I want to be held like that. Years and years ago.
That water, white-cold as it moves. The current, its currencies. Withheld from being able to stop or go back for anyone.
The way a parent moves when withholding a world that they don't want a…

Samuel Day Wharton @fakeourway.bsky.social · last mo.

Geffrey Davis from Sixth Finch, Summer 2026 #SmallPoemSunday @tomsnarsky.bsky.social sixthfinch.com/davis2.html

Geffrey Davis, Ladybugs

Come fall, the neighbor
Widow pays coin for each small
Flare we can release
Inside her garden-: I make
Safe darkness of my fists.

Daniel Lassell @dlassell.bsky.social · last mo.

For your @sealeychallenge.bsky.social consideration #sealeychallenge

Two books against a tree: Frame Inside a Frame by Daniel Lassell and Spit by Daniel Lassell

UGA Press @ugapress.bsky.social · 2mo ago

It's true! All books are still 50% off through the end of July with code 08SALE250. You know you want to restock your bookshelves.

Of Poetry Podcast @ofpoetrypodcast.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Of elegy, of aunts, of mothers and father, of Bombay, of form and revision, of the inexhaustibility of grief and hope and joy—join @preetivangani.bsky.social on Episode 90 as she reads from her new collection FIFTY MOTHERS, out now from @riverriverbooks.bsky.social! share.transistor.fm/s/b6cd1fe1

Graphic featuring author photo of Preeti Vangani and book cover of fifty mothers and the text:

Episode 89: Preeti
Vangani (Of Being Rooted in Elegy, Embodiment, and Inexhaustibility in Poetry)
FIFTY
MOTHERS
POEMS
PREETI
Preeti Vangani, author of Fifty Mothers
Listen: On Spotify, Apple, Google, and elsewhere
Purchase: Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026)

Pat Foran @pdforan.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"It is perhaps living that one never gets over. / To live alone after living inside someone is to live within the ellipsis— / the constancy of it, the chaos. ..." @chelsdingman.bsky.social in the Los Angeles Review losangelesreview.org/the-face-to-...

The Face-to-Face Encounter by Chelsea Dingman - The Los Angeles Review

Twenty minutes away from this house is a house without rooms and cabinets and foal-dark carpeting and a womanwho wears my mother’s face to clean the dishes and the linoleum floors and the delicate whi...

losangelesreview.org

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 2mo ago

My new poem is up at The Los Angeles Review this week:

The Face-to-Face Encounter by Chelsea Dingman
Twenty minutes away from this house is a house without rooms and cabinets and foal-dark carpeting and a woman who wears my mother's face to clean the dishes and the linoleum floors and the delicate white lace underclothes
that she wears on special occasions and the problem of loneliness in the form of a crawlspace. In some ways, I lost my mother when my father died. Before the house was gutted. Before someone changed the locks. Before she began disappearing in front of me, like her
mother, as I told her about my day from the kitchen
doorway. Sometimes, I think writers are just
people who weren't listened to as children, and so remain strange everywhere but in language. Sometimes, when I say mother I'm speaking about my father. I'm trying to figure out what I owe a future where 1 am not, and that is different. My grandmother,
in the years before she died, endured the slow siphoning of her mind. How sad but maybe kind, I'd thought, not to remember being cruel or rash, nor the cratered body in the bathroom mirror, Christmas
baking and days out by the lake, playing gin
rummy or solitaire, knowing that she was dying, that she would die in a strange room in her mind. In a care facility, how fast she forgot
to feed herself, the names for her children. Their faces. Is one life
exchanged for another when one retires, or might retiring be
how one turns away from a life, from aging, from aphasia, from winter's slag? My mother picks my daughter up from school
every Thursday. Early retirement she took after her mother died and her partner retired. I wish we were closer, but I don't say that. I wish I'd let her know me instead of what she imagines
of me. My young sons left home this year to imagine a life
apart from mine, which is all I've wanted for them amid the waiting mothering amounts to. The indignity of days where they are not not breathing or eating or fighting now I face. The presence of their absences, deathless as a dream I…

Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Louise Glück ♥️ “You see again how far away / each thing is from every other thing.” from AVERNO

TELESCOPE

There is a moment after you move your eye away when you forget where you are because you've been living, it seems, somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.
You've stopped being here in the world.
You're in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.
You're not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity.
Then you're in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill, taking the telescope apart.
You realize afterward not that the image is false but the relation is false.
You see again how far away each thing is from every other thing.

Jídé Salawu @jidesalawu.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I think of trees that resist floods and storms, I think of the celebrations where the gourd is left to rest. Hussain Ahmed www.guernicamag.com/sekere/

Ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀

Sometimes, love comes in a parcel of rice straws

guernicamag.com

Roxane Gay @roxanegay.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Today, at @therumpus.net we're launching a series we're calling What is Freedom, where we ask a range of creative people to define freedom in whatever way they choose. This afternoon, we'll share the first answer, from artist Vincent Valdez. therumpus.net/2026/07/01/w...

What Is Freedom? - The Rumpus

This year, 2026, is the 250th anniversary of American independence. This 4th of July will be a bombastic celebration of an independence that came at an

therumpus.net

Haymarket Books @haymarketbooks.org · 2mo ago

Our history has always been contraband.

250 Years of Resistance

Our history has always been contraband. Take a break from the bizarre and depressing spectacle of the Donald Trump-led celebrations of the 250th year of the U.S. state to learn about the real his...

haymarketbooks.org

@poemtoday.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Where Am I? How far from what I keep calling the world? It appears right here, a hand's reach away, but it's miles and miles from here to the end of my arm. Craig Morgan Teicher Image courtesy @chelsdingman.bsky.social

Pat Foran @pdforan.bsky.social · 6mo ago

“… I will grow my hair like loneliness. Memory will become the address lost with my father’s body. If I had loved myself too? ...” @chelsdingman.bsky.social in Indianapolis Review theindianapolisreview.com/if-it-is-not...

If it is Not Only the Moment of the Event But the Passing Out of it That is Traumatic, Survival Itself Can Be a Crisis

No lights on, my Baba sits in her livingroom, telling me about the endof the world. I am alonethere. My father dropped me offtwo hours from home when he went awayto work. July, merciless in the hea…

theindianapolisreview.com

Dr. Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 6mo ago

“No.” is a sentence.

Nathan Kalman-Lamb@nkalamb.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Nothing to see here other than a university telling its research community that AI can appropriately be used to "generate first drafts." unbcloud.sharepoint.com/sites/AI-at-...

How AI Can Support Your Research
Efficiency

Automate routine or repetitive tasks, freeing up more time for experiments, analysis, and discovery.

Creativity

Spark new ideas, explore alternative approaches, or generate first drafts to move past the “blank page.”

Clarity

Translate complex data, technical language, or lengthy findings into clear summaries for colleagues, partners, or broader audiences.

Organization

Turn research notes, articles, or meeting discussions into structured summaries, action items, or literature maps.

Accessibility

Develop research outputs that are more inclusive and easier to share with collaborators, students, and the wider UNB community.

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 6mo ago

New poem in the Winter issue of The Indianapolis Review. Thank you to Natalie Solmer for including me along w/ all the other stunning work in this issue. theindianapolisreview.com

If it is Not Only the Moment of the Event But the Passing Out of it That is Traumatic, Survival Itself Can Be a Crisis

No lights on, my Baba sits in her living room, telling me about the end
of the world. I am alone there. My father dropped me off
two hours from home when he went away to work. July, merciless in the heat of the valley
near Kamloops. The sagebrush,
under the sky's weight, sulks. The world burns
as smoke from wildfires
along the Pacific coast consume the city. Outside,
she sees a war instead. The old country. She will not see her parents again. She will not see
her husband who drank himself to death after two of their children died. My father
will die within a year. An unmarked shoulder of highway will testify
to the existence only of time. I will grow my hair like loneliness. Memory
will become the address
lost with my father's body. If I had loved myself
too? When the TV quieted at night. When the fires reached the doors.

Pat Foran @pdforan.bsky.social · 7mo ago

"To stay alive, even the dead must endure / temporariness. Despite disease. Despite the burden, by which I mean / a refrain. Its vows." @chelsdingman.bsky.social in @therumpus.net therumpus.net/2026/02/02/r...

Given Limits Exist, Streets, Oblivion - The Rumpus

I don’t want to be at peace. Outside, the buffalograss rails at the houses. Terracotta storms the bougainvillea. Each street in any direction is directionless. I’m beginning

therumpus.net

The Rumpus @therumpus.net · 7mo ago

"To stay alive, even the dead must endure / temporariness." From "Given Limits Exist, Streets, Oblivion," a new poem by @chelsdingman.bsky.social. ➡️ buff.ly/EBzGLxN

Melissa Ostrom @melostrom.bsky.social · 7mo ago

“What is death/ if not a dream of distance?” This stunner by @chelsdingman.bsky.social in @therumpus.net.💙

Chelsea Dingman@chelsdingman.bsky.social · 7mo ago

I’ve got a new poem up @therumpus.net today. Thank you to Saeed Jones & editors for giving it such a wonderful home.

Given Limits Exist, Streets, Oblivion
I don't want to be at peace. Outside, the buffalograss rails at the houses. Terracotta storms the bougainvillea. Each street in any direction is directionless. I'm beginning to think the concreteness that I seek in theory is waking each day, walking along a tree-lined pond. Today, approaching a fallen aspen, my child turns to me and asks, do you want to live forever? Beyond April, trees are wildfire. The child is a stranger I held in a blood museum once. Our narrative, one of proximities. I like to imagine I knew aloneness before I was occupiable. Reterritorialization: a migration from within desire (or do I mean language?) —reality's jumble of tenses & imagined borders. Something must give. I have everything I thought I wanted, still I'm incurably lonely in the way of capitalism or an abandoned child. In the only photo I have of my dead father, the image refuses identity. Whom I can or cannot remember I murder or save. To stay alive, even the dead must endure temporariness. Despite disease. Despite the burden, by which I mean a refrain. Its vows. Without her child, today, a young friend calls home a chapel of wet grass. The black trees. Absence. And what of the symbolon? That unpronounceable name transmitted as a promise that connects touch to a touchable silence. Sometimes, I think pain is a world I am too tired to carry. A creek, creeklight. The bee crawling on a rope in the basement I crushed this morning. Lest, beestung on a Tuesday in some future June, I arrive. Last words: the rain falling through the child. My body, failing to imagine me. Asking to be known. What is death if not a dream of distance? I wish I could see my child to the end of their life and not see them die.

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 7mo ago

I’ve got a new poem up @therumpus.net today. Thank you to Saeed Jones & editors for giving it such a wonderful home.

Glass Poetry Press @glasspoetry.bsky.social · 7mo ago

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

Forgotten Poets @forgottenpoets.bsky.social · 9mo ago

From 'Five Poems' —Humberto Ak'abal (tr. Michael Bazzett) #poetry #poem #poems

The River

Kneeling
on a mat,
bent over a stone,
my mother washes
and washes
and washes.

My little sister
sleeps in a basket
covered in willow leaves.

Me? I am sitting
on piled straw,
watching how the water leaves
and how the river stays.

Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Proof copy is here, and she’s lovely, so let this be a little reminder that MORE FLOWERS is out with @triohousepress.org in less than 3 months! You can pre-order at the link in the replies or wherever books are sold! Here’s to more poetry and more flowers! 🌺🌸🌼

The poetry collection, More Flowers, resting against a vase of red carnations. ♥️🌸💐

Creative Writing at NEIU @neiu-cw.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Remembering Alice Wong: Writer, Advocate, Friend

Though we were in frequent conversation for a decade, I only got to meet my friend Alice Wong in person just once. And when I did, I was a bundle of nerves—and that was before she cussed me out wi…

lithub.com

Melissa Ostrom @melostrom.bsky.social · 9mo ago

“only after breaking was my body/ believable” This poem by @chelsdingman.bsky.social in @amsterdamreview.bsky.social is so beautiful. (Thanks for passing it along, @pdforan.bsky.social!)❤️

Pat Foran@pdforan.bsky.social · 9mo ago

“… You are a homesickness buffered by fantasies of orchids, scotch pines, daybreak. Blue graves scattered over cities. People I tried to love but couldn’t. …” @chelsdingman.bsky.social in @amsterdamreview.bsky.social www.amsterdamreview.org/we-have-know...

Pat Foran @pdforan.bsky.social · 9mo ago

We Have Known Each Other at Every Hour by Chelsea Dingman | Amsterdam Review

Read "We Have Known Each Other at Every Hour" by Chelsea Dingman

amsterdamreview.org

Ben Niespodziany 📚🎪@neonpajamas.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Ann Jäderlund tr. by @johannesg.bsky.social

Out of the earth
forest forest
mountain
river
someone has time

Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Chelsea Dingman ♥️ “There is such violence / in the sunset.” @chelsdingman.bsky.social

Sunset

Do you forget the roar
of tiny lungs unsettling
your sleep? How I was once, a sparrow
lost in the yard? Or was it safer
for you to let him
open new seams, your scars still
so raw? I used to wake
and run all of the faucets,
as if we lived inside the falls. The house, lit
like a constellation. Was I ever yours
after that? There is such violence
in the sunset. You wanted me
to beg, but I held my breath as I wanted
to be held. I should have said I wanted sky
to claim the stars. That I understood
to be a good girl I had to lie
low like the aging hardwood floor. But,
when I return,
it's to stand in the soft light
on the sun-porch. To admit the sunsets
are drawn by my hand.

Maureen Thorson @maureenthorson.bsky.social · 10mo ago

“Carry me out / reel me in” A poem by Kevin Young.

GUTBUCKET

I want, like
water, you—

something wet
gainst the back

of my throat. Carry
me out

reel me in
I been down

this well too long—

Amsterdam Review @amsterdamreview.bsky.social · 10mo ago

"Belief gave way / to grief, its purgatories. Who will look out for you / after you are grief enough / to believe in?" A poem by 𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗹𝘀𝗲𝗮 𝗗𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗺𝗮𝗻 @chelsdingman.bsky.social in the Fall 2025 issue bit.ly/AmsterdamReview #poetry #poetrycommunity

At dusk, the dusk holds
the days apart. I am also other than

I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness,
Simone Weil wrote at the onset of WWII. Still,

this almost-hour. Its snows. All that I still have
to lose. What grain, what glacier,

what child, what plain
did I hand my emptiness

that I would feel full? Still,
I don’t understand why

Chen Chen @chenchenwrites.bsky.social · 10mo ago

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use. —Louise Glück, from "October"