Electric Dress provides a broad range of explorations of personal, political and cultural materials. The poems cross a number of landscapes—taking the reader from Hong Kong to Spain to the Philippines to Central Illinois. They insist on the ways in which we are tied to history and to our landscapes, often drawing upon archival materials and visual art objects in order to provide meditations on what we inherit and what we wish to disavow. If instructors are looking to adopt a collection of poems for their beginning or advanced poetry workshops, I hope that they will consider Electric Dress for its variety and complexity.
Joanne Diaz is the author of The Lessons (winner of the Gerald Cable First Book Award from Silverfish Review Press) and My Favorite Tyrants (winner of the Brittingham Award from the University of Wisconsin Press). With Ian Morris, she is the co-editor of The Little Magazine in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press), and she is the co-host, with Abram Van Engen, of the Poetry for All podcast. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and she has also received fellowships from Ragdale and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is the Isaac Funk Endowed Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.
"Joanne Diaz deftly weaves through art and history, science and etymology, to reveal all the miracles and terrors of our own making. These poems move in delightful and surprising ways through fears and violences, but they only pause there as they travel towards common and impossible tenderness." — Traci Brimhall, author of five collections of poetry, most recently Love Prodigal.
"Joanne Diaz's poems move with a quiet force as they explore dark forms of knowledge; they are sensuous and learned, erudite and erotically alive. Electric Dress, her exhilarating new book, is magnificently charged with sparks of ingenuity and awe." — Richie Hoffman, 2025 Guggenheim and NEA Literature Fellow.
"Just when we need it most, Electric Dress delivers a multifaceted poetry of social justice via an intertextual weaving of history, biography, science (Edison's and Bell's inventions, medicine, ecology, astronomy), classical mythology, literature, and visual art. In fact, it is largely an ekphrastic collection, but only in the richest and most resonant ways—poems that re-see and reinterpret the art, that connect it to larger concerns, and that give astute attention to the artists' processes, historical and cultural contexts, and lives. What moves me most about this insightful collection is the depth of empathy Diaz has for her subjects—artists and writers who faced fascist regimes, the ravages of war, and other hardships; laborers ('ghost workers') who often lose their lives on the job; children who have accidentally shot another; an angry elephant named Topsy who was executed by electrocution: 'In the moments before Topsy died,/it almost seemed like the cyanide-laced carrots/and her slow walk in copper slippers/were a part of the elephant's wish/a last great bow/that only she could initiate.' Tell me, how does such a poem ever leave you? I'll tell you, it doesn't." — Brenda Cárdenas, Wisconsin Poet Laureate & author of Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023)
