by David Dodd Lee

Dictionary sonnets are word collages—found language juxtaposed in such a way that they possess narrative thrust even though they are wholly improvised out of found text.

David Dodd Lee is the author of fourteen full-length books of poems & a chapbook, including Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues Press, 1997), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), Abrupt Rural (New Issues Press, 2004), The Nervous Filaments (Four Way Books, 2010) Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, the Ashbery Erasure Poems (BlaxeVox, 2010), Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014), & And Other’s, Vaguer Presences (BlazeVox, 2018), a second book of Ashbery erasure poems. An eleventh book, The Bay, is forthcoming from Broadstone Books in 2025. He has published fiction and poetry in many literary magazines (including The Nation, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, Willow Springs, and Pleiades). He is also a painter, collage artist, and a photographer. Since 2014 he has been featured in three one person exhibitions, mixing collage & poetry texts into single improvisational art works. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Lily Poetry Review, Off the Coast, The Hunger, The Rumpus, and Watershed Review. His collage work, accompanied by an interview, appeared in a recent issue of The Journal. In 2016 he began making sculpture, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. Dead Zones, a book of dictionary sonnets, and The Coldest Winter on Earth, an expanded version of a book originally released in 2012, are forthcoming. Lee is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press and the online journal The Glacier.