Craft: Tory Dent

Tory Dent (1958-2005) was an important poet of the AIDS crisis. Of all the responses to the AIDS crisis, Dent’s poems are not so much elegies, but expressionist and explosive invectives. She contracted HIV from her college boyfriend, a hemophiliac who also died of AIDS, in 1988 when she was 30. She published three books, Black Milk (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005), HIV, Mon Amour (Sheep Meadow Press, 1999), which won the 1999 James Laughlin Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and What Silence Equals (Persea Books, 1993). Her maximal poetry uses very long lines and very long forms, as if she didn’t have time to be concise. Her language defies death and lividity through the pure power of her expression.

Tory Dent: “I touch with the trust, palm upon psalm, that the cumulative effect / of all my writing will concretize as well as convey / the smoldering circumstance…”

Stanley Kunitz, discussing Dent’s poems, said: “her language uncoils with such vitality, it would seem that speaking were an act of the immune system, a primary means of survival.” Adrienne Rich added: “Tory Dent teaches us that poetry must speak out of extremity.”