In “The Contaminants,” we’re presented with dying landscape, populated by militiamen and “bunker neighbors” who are horrified by a woman bringing life-that is, triplets-into the world. Against these masterfully overdrawn backdrops, her characters speak and behave in small, human ways. This “true optimism” that the speaker in “The Contaminants” attempts to maintain sneaks into every corner of this collection full of women making impossible decisions in more impossible situations. As these first-person narrations raggedly unfurl, their speakers begin a thought, correct themselves, then drift into silence, their short phrases separated by ellipses: “It was all going to work out,” she writes in “The Contaminants,“ “ … proud … optimistic … my triplets … The number three has magical residue … Was that my idea … ? or did I overhear … ” And, with the thought left unfinished, the stanza ends.

The majority of these poems extend down the page in dense blocks of prose.

We peered all day into the strange fountain.” Her poems’ long lines stretch across the page, but it’s only in this first poem and a handful of others that Dennigan allows her line to end in the finality of a period. In “The Youngest Living Thing in L.A.,” which opens this collection, Dennigan’s speaker clutches a silent baby in a silent city: “I said to the baby, We will stand here until there is snow on the mountain. In its ability to contain all of the abstractions, rhythms and forms he found in music and literature, painting became a fierce, unrelenting compulsion.The poems in Darcie Dennigan’s Madame X play out their eerie dramas in the liminal space between dream and reality, utopia and dystopia.

But visual art became increasingly dominant during this time. In 2000, he returned to the United States and published a novel and a dozen short stories. He also lived and studied in Berlin, Germany and the Czech Republic. He moved to England in 1994 and enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Essex. A Providence native, Dimitri moved to Los Angles in 1990 to pursue art and music. He has shown in New York City, Miami, Cincinnati, and New London, and has exhibited throughout Providence, with shows at Brown University and the University of Rhode Island. He has published illustrations for the Kenyon Review, Bomb and Guernica and illustrations and book covers for Dandelion Farm, Madame X and Ephebic Dreamery Department by the acclaimed poet and playwright Darcie Dennigan. In 2013, he was elected into the Drawing Center. In 2012, Dimitri received Fellowships in Painting from the Vermont Studio Center and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.

Madame X by Darcie Dennigan