Tessera

D.W. Baker

@lowermelody.bsky.social

submerging poet, dad, editor ~ place, bodies, belonging, the end of the world ~ masthead @VariantLit.bsky.social @PhillyChapbook.bsky.social ~ he/him ~ 🪐💀🏳️‍🌈🍃 https://www.dwbakerpoetry.com

566 Posts956 Follower 1175 Folgt

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 9h ago

I think it's good that the Nobel winner's body of work features a variety of oddities that not everyone likes. Great voices hone themselves, in part, through experimental encounters with language (and technology) over a series of years. Celebrate pioneers, not emulators

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3d ago

the latest of my strange squares

I am not what I am
-- Iago, Act 1 Scene 1 of Shakespeare's Othello

ALIBI
LEARN
IAGOS
BROKE
INSET

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 2w ago

artsfuse.org/334387/book-...

And from a 1987 lecture at Boston University: “Translation, an apparently safe compromise between the psychic risks of original composition and the grip of inertia, tricks the ego into lowering its guard—all risk dispelled by the reassuring presence of the original text—just long enough to release the airy impulse of voice.” He even compares translation to a sexual tryst: getting inside the skin of another, where union accompanies necessary separateness.

Peter Wortsman
Talking in Tongues
Essays on Language and Literature
Palm Art Press

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · last mo.

I have fallen. it's a bad one

a picture of the author's positive COVID test result

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 2mo ago

short poem published in Five Fleas, a journal of haiku, monostitch, & related forms, back in 2024

birdsong in my brainstem passes the Turing test

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"Sad/House/Keeping," one of my color studies, published in @aprosexia.org living this poem today after a sad & anxious week

Sad/House/Keeping

grey like matter

blue like down

falling after

manic crown

grey like hazy

blue like waves

think i'm lazy

lost in place

grey like bloodless

blue like veins

beckon carving

final name

grey like morals

blue like code

one-way portal

waiting room

grey like neutral

blue like calm

soulless model

staged like home

grey like cobwebs

blue like dawn

sweeping motion

clean-up song

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Delighted to be part of this forthcoming anthology, A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, featuring "essays on form & water," from @riverriverbooks.bsky.social. I have a piece on contrapuntal poems & consciousness. The publishers are currently fundraising to help cover costs: see below comment for more details.

A River Runs Through It

Essays on Form & Water

Amorak Huey & Han Vanderhart, Editors

cover by Alban Fischer

Epistemic Literary- Read Issue 8: Righteous Rage now!@epistemiclit.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Submissions open August 1! Agency vs. Determinism Poetry - Micro and flash fiction - CNF - Visual Art epistemiclit.com/submissions/

Agency
VS
DETERMINISM
August 1 - 31, 2026
Epistemic
Literary

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I'm grateful to @onlypoemsmag.bsky.social for reprinting my review of @toddedillard.bsky.social's RAGNARÖK AT THE FATHER-DAUGHTER DANCE (2024: @variantlit.bsky.social), first published in @phillychapbook.bsky.social. Here is an excerpt:

Dillard’s style is often direct and vivid, but does not shy away from the abstract and surreal; he uses several techniques to defamiliarize quotidian detail—reminiscent of Charles Simic—that are well-matched to content. Perhaps the most striking example of this is a poem titled after an abstraction, “The Newness,” that is tightly composed around imagery of toilets. Dillard opens with a realist declarative sentence: “Sometimes you have to get rid of a toilet.” From there, he guides readers using a mixture of imaginative detail (“Do you know how easy a toilet shatters / under one sledgehammer swing?”) and carefully-enjambed revelation (“it’s like / when you died and, after, I broke / your life apart”), all of which culminate in a changed way of seeing:

Now when I go for walks I wonder
where a toilet would fit in. I wonder,
if you were here, what new place
you would pick to abandon.

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

had a horror pantoum accepted for spooky season 🎃 I think it's the perfect form for horror. I've written a few. Throwback to "The Lighthouse," the first I attempted, first published in @cosmicdaffodil.bsky.social then reprinted in @divinationsmag.bsky.social

I saw the pale spire of the lighthouse, vanishing softly out of the distant fog.
Surviving on blood oranges staining shaking hands red –
It had to be the first building after two weeks hiding in the waves.
Circling around, raising my eyes to rove the heights –

Surviving on blood oranges staining shaking hands red –
I quickly closed the distance and went headfirst through the dark space in the floor.
Circling around, raising my eyes to rove the heights –
Hands behind me pushed away – stairway slanting – air – into the gasping air –

I quickly closed the distance and went headfirst through the dark space in the floor.
They smiled first with greening eyes, then quietly pulled me under the surface.
Hands behind me pushed away – stairway slanting – air – into the gasping air –
I slowly sank deeper. Another bubble of breath escaped.

They smiled first with greening eyes, then quietly pulled me under the surface.
It had to be the first building after two weeks hiding in the waves.
I slowly sank deeper. Another bubble of breath escaped.
I saw the pale spire of the lighthouse, vanishing softly out of the distant fog.

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

love to ignore all non-urgent email for a few days to reset my anticipatory-shame procrastination clock with respite before a cold plunge back in

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

from my review, "Rhythm and Somatic Consciousness: on AUTOCARTOGRAPHIES by @evaalterpoet.bsky.social" (2025: Eulogy Press), published in Dodo Eraser

$In the third section, “Mythogenesis,” Alter’s speaker offers poems that demonstrate rhythm as a tool for self-exploration. All three use her signature form of ten-syllable lines systematically broken both vertically (into couplets) and horizontally (by intentional use of space). Alter plainly describes this constraint in the book’s afterword: “I decided to approach material I’d been avoiding for much of my life by applying a simple formal constraint to most poems: ten-syllable lineation. By providing my mind with a rule and rhythm, I was able to articulate patterns that have haunted me since childhood” (31). One of the book’s most striking poems, “Chimera,” uses the mythological figure of a beast with mismatched parts to describe the conscious subject’s encounters with these hidden aspects of self: that chemical frontier fracturing me— memory and impulse exposed removed— synapses shaved somewhere unreachable—$

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

How I start my mornings now. Stretching dough for the lunch rush

a rack of prepared pizza dough next to a brick oven

D.W. Baker@lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

one year later: recently earned a promotion to a chef role. starting Monday, i'll spend 40 hours weekly making brick oven pizza. weekends & holidays off. Good benefits. Time to read, write, & be with my family. I still miss the kids I taught, but not the bullshit. Life is good

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The third section of "Traversing Floodwaters In Helios' Cup," one of my linked tanka experiments, recently published in @cincinnatireview.bsky.social's miCRo series

III. In

interior castle
intentional halo
insulating field
interfaith geometry
interdimensional fluid

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Can anyone comment on their experience with Dancing Girl Press as either a customer or an author? I've found some negative feedback online (that they take money then don't fulfill orders or pay out), but nothing from within a year.

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Have started printing out all my digital review copies of shorter works. Also appreciate receiving print copies of longer works much more than before... The marginalia process just gets much better results than typing notes on a screen, for me at least

a lap desk with a printed copy of Atropa Belladonna Coursing Through My Veins by Sudikshaa Amar

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

D.W. Baker@lowermelody.bsky.social · last yr.

It's the first summer in 10 years that i'm not experiencing rising anxiety as the school year approaches. I'm halfway through my food service shift. I spent the manual labor outlining and beginning to compose an essay in my mind. Life after teaching, so far, continues to impress

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

My son just asked if I have ever played chess, which gave me occasion to bring out this artifact of my childhood in Pittsburgh. I had a 1200+ rating and spent many a Saturday on the tournament circuit before giving it up in middle school.

a trophy, shaped like a knight wearing a crown, labeled "1st place - 2000 - 27th annual public library chess tournament"

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Here, translation choices as an example of Simic's "endless tinkering" -- an exercise in combinatoric possibility using one of the smallest canonical forms of verse: www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/pass...

Matsuo Basho: Frog Haiku

(thirty-two translations and one commentary)

D.W. Baker@lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

as a short form enthusiast, here is one of my favorite takes on tiny poems, from Charles Simic's 2013 interview with Granta

CS: Of all the things ever said about poetry, the axiom that less is more has made the biggest and the most lasting impression on me. I have written many short poems in my life, except ‘written’ is not the right word to describe how they came into existence. Since it’s not possible to sit down and write an eight-line poem that’ll be vast for its size, these poems are assembled over a long period of time from words and images floating in my head. A brief poem intended to capture the imagination of the reader requires endless tinkering to get all its parts right.

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The final paragraph of my latest review, "The Hologram and the Hunted: on FOLLOW THIS BLOOD TO FIND A DEAD THING by Charles K. Carter" (Ferbwood Press: 2026), published by @variantlit.bsky.social

Regardless of which illusion is targeted, Carter’s work points continually towards acceptance: of self and others; of the natural world’s dangerous beauty; of the ugly necessities of survival. As the speaker of “Interloper” states: “I want to find a way to belong in this wilderness. / Even if it is to feed its beasts of prey” (39). In an increasingly holographic world—social media feeds, manufactured consent in mass media, unrealistic pornography, AI-generated facsimiles of human creativity, and more—work such as Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing is a welcome reminder that authentic vulnerability’s reward is worth the risk.

Variant Literature@variantlit.bsky.social · 3mo ago

New review up on the site from @lowermelody.bsky.social "Tension between comfortable illusion and disquieting reality animates Charles K. Carter’s Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing (2026: Fernwood Press)." variantlit.com/book-review-...

Variant Literature @variantlit.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The Hologram and the Hunted: on Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing by Charles K. Carter

Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing by Charles K. Carter (Fernwood Press: 2026) reviewed D.W. Baker for Variant Lit.

variantlit.com

the engine(idling lit @the-engine-idling.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Check out the Contributors' Curio: buff.ly/yytUFIm! The curio houses info on our contributors' creative projects. Today our #spotlight is on D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social ! #writingcommunity #poetrycommunity #writers #authors #artists #writerslife

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"Meteorite," a short poem featured in my microchapbook LOVE'S THE BURNING BOY (@fifthwheelpress.bsky.social pride series 2026), was first published & nominated for Best of the Net by @identitytheory.bsky.social

Meteorite

You are both:

the impact;

the celestial space
created on earth
once

everything in
the crater
burns away.

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 3mo ago

as a short form enthusiast, here is one of my favorite takes on tiny poems, from Charles Simic's 2013 interview with Granta

D.W. Baker @lowermelody.bsky.social · 4mo ago

i am coming to believe that the tyranny of requisite superlatives, the 11/10 blurb culture, is a cultural analogue of the spread of therapy-speak. both frames of language minimize the individual's accountability for imperfection, blunting growth & development in favor of comfort

the engine(idling lit @the-engine-idling.bsky.social · 4mo ago

**e(i Contributor Book Review!** @thmazing.bsky.social reviews "(e)lament" by @lowermelody.bsky.social & @gr8earlofhell.bsky.social Full review here: engineidling.net/reviews Find the book here: stonecorpse.com/nat-raum-d-w...

Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl @deardara.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Irina Ratushinskaya didn’t scratch her poems into a bar of soap with a matchstick, memorize them and wash away her forbidden work as a political prisoner in a Soviet labor camp for you to tell me AI is "inevitable"

the engine(idling lit @the-engine-idling.bsky.social · 4mo ago

** e(i Contributor Book Review! ** Here, @lowermelody.bsky.social reviews @thmazing.bsky.social's "Thubrina" (Antemoff '25)! Full review: engineidling.net/reviews ** If yr one of our contributors & would like to sign up for a Book Review Exchange fill out this form: forms.gle/vnKrBHwdFDUw... 🩷

Exposition Review @expositionreview.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Read @bestofthenet.bsky.social winner @altmanill0.bsky.social & finalist K-Ming Chang + @jferhow.bsky.social, @victoriawrites.bsky.social, @sofiaxaguilar.bsky.social, @dshigdon.bsky.social, @jonathankravetz.bsky.social, @natashiadeon.bsky.social & more in Vol. VI: HUNGER tinyurl.com/ExpoV6Hunger

Vol. VI: "Hunger" - Exposition Review

Vol. VI: “Hunger” confronts the question of what is essential and explores the core idea of need driven by a deep and unrelenting desire. An ache to satiate or itch to scratch — something that we ofte...

tinyurl.com