Belle Laide: Poems

"A whirling, Dionysian poet. . . . Dwyer negotiates brazenly with huge tracts of the human condition. Her leaping imagination will make you laugh out loud. The poems in Belle Laide are a rodeo; hang on to your saddle, cowboy."—Tony Hoagland

A man with a shovel in his hand / is a sexy thing.
I dare myself to bury my dead, / to incline towards Cupid's clouds.
I dare myself to love a man all-out. / I'm less afraid of the stray hairs of strangers
left behind in hotel bathtubs; / less afraid of the sounds in the wind.
Conversing is sometimes useless, / like beavers clawing ice –
hoping to erase back into water.

Joanne Dominique Dwyer earned a BA in creative writing from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a Bread Loaf Scholar award, and the Anne Halley Poetry Prize. Dwyer resides in northern New Mexico where she works as facilitator for the Alzheimer's Poetry Project.