"Dimitra Xidous is truly a delicious writer. She feasts upon the body in Keeping Bees. A strong, unique voice; at times, a young Aristotle and that obsession with natural process, at times her tones are that of the sharp artist palette of Bishop, but more often laced with a sensual evocation of a female Neruda. This voice is as strong and unique as any young poet writing in English today. I was left breathless. Astounding originality, Xidous is fearless" - Elaine Feeney
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Keeping Bees (Doire Press, 2014)
"To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves" - Federico Garcia Lorca The work in Keeping Bees is concerned with the body; it is a collection about the body and love, about the body in and out of love. It draws on time and place, and place in time – of three years living in Greece as a child, and seeing death in a claw, ‘her mouth sharp and yellow’; of 5 weeks living in Madrid as a woman in my early 30s, giving myself away to the city, in every way, and the city, the city giving herself away to me too; of being in Dublin, and re(membering) the best peach I've ever had, a peach that came all the way from British Columbia. In these, and other ways, Keeping Bees is concerned with the body; the body there, and then; the body in time, and the body in place, in place in time. The collection is a record of how the body takes up space; and it is also a record, in another way: Keeping Bees is a record of falling in love (a record of, a testimony in fact: "love is equal parts honey and sting, and where love rumbles/bodies sound like beehives"). Keeping Bees is a collection of bodies - dogs and horses, cockroaches and bees, figs and peaches - and the body in, and the body out, in and out of love: "the shenanigans of intimacy boil down to what/passes between two people when their mouths are open/and desire hangs like a dog's tongue". To purchase a copy, please visit doirepress.com In 2014, I was the Featured Poet in The Stinging Fly's Spring Issue. To accompany this feature, as well as the publication of Keeping Bees, I was invited to write an essay about the collection, and how I brought it altogether - Keeping Bees and The Body (or why I will never fuck a man who is not a feminist) . All about the cover: Ria Czerniak-Lebov climbed into my head and when she came out, she made the most beautiful cover for Keeping Bees. It is everything I ever could have wanted; it is everything it should be: lush, sensual, full of bees and peaches (oh, there is a story here, or two) - an anatomically correct heart, and a cockroach, or two (and oh, there is a story here too, all about what it is to have a cockroach heart). For more on Ria, and her work, you can click here (and here, too). |
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Film Poems from Keeping Bees
Onions
'My grandmother picked only tomatoes that looked pregnant
because she said they made the best salads.'
'My grandmother picked only tomatoes that looked pregnant
because she said they made the best salads.'
Here is a Box (Vive La Petite Mort!)
'...decay does not rage in the same way'.
'...decay does not rage in the same way'.