Our hollowness sings (signed copy)

by Ruth Dickey

(Unicorn Press, paperback, 2024)

“Ruth Dickey writes out of human brokenness, season after season of losing things, losing people, especially her mother, and yet finds a way to heal and tether herself to earth. I am heartened and moved by the way that Our hollowness sings becomes a series of hard-won affirmations, courageously turning a collection of griefs into a book of blessings.”
—EDWARD HIRSCH

“Our hollowness sings celebrates that implacable yearning to seek grace and possibility even in ourselves despite ‘all the ways we are broken.’ Poem after gorgeous poem, Ruth Dickey surprises us with striking insights about the everyday spaces we inhabit and the everyday people who surround us. What wonders await those who accept this enticing invitation to ‘walk through these doors of light.’”
—RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ, author of To the Boy Who Was Night

“In Ruth Dickey’s wondrous new book, Our hollowness sings, something extraordinary happens. Instead of pages that talk to, at or around you, these pages listen to you. It is rare to be listened to in this way, with caring and force. Here, in Dickey's wide and raw vision, opposites are welcome – no hurt or tenderness is turned away. Love and grief, loss and unreasonable joy commingle, leap boundaries and constrictions. The poems are honest, funny, heartbreaking, distressed, alert and awake. ‘Everything feels broken / Every broken thing / feels’. You can be dog and human, stars and bodegas. With deep, inclusive music, the poems track your life as it is, without filters, without branding—allowing us to be ‘both tear and mend’. Reading this work is necessary antidote to an Instagrammable world. It is like releasing the breath you didn’t know you were holding. ‘All of it saying “I love you to the place where speech began.”’”
—MEREDITH STRICKER, author of Rewild, winner of the Dorset Prize

“In Our hollowness sings, poet Ruth Dickey writes “Sometimes seeing one chickadee / balanced on a swaying string of lights is everything I need, sometimes my / whole body is a bruise I am pressing,’ describing a poetic worldview that is complicated, painful, but also offers unexpected glimmers of much-needed joy through image and word-play. These poems are about a failed marriage, mother-loss and an aging father whose words are slipping away and about walking the dog, avoiding monkeys, and lottery tickets. Our hollowness sings is brimming with lyric surprises, remembrances of ‘things’ gone ‘without permission, without notice,’ under skies that are ‘hydrangea blue.’ With wistfulness and honesty, Ruth Dickey writes of memory and sorrow but also of dreams yet to come.’
—KATHLEEN DRISKELL, author of The Vine Temple

“Our hollowness sings explores a litany of personal losses: a mother, a marriage, a sense that life isn’t kind or reasonable. These poems ruminate and grieve, bewildered by the hollowness caused by absence. But they aren’t satisfied with the mere cataloging of pain, they reach for what comes after, how loss, if never quite transformed, is at least borne. Pain isn’t just obliteration, but a counterpoint to the return of joy: ‘The moment breath feels / impossible, lying in dirt, staring up. I want to live, / knocked flat, in that moment before breath.’ Dickey’s poems are elegant, intricate and always profoundly humane.“
—SARAH C. HARWELL, Associate Director of the Syracuse University MFA Program in Creative Writing

“‘I never imagined devastation could be so precise,’ Ruth Dickey writes, remembering a tornado from her childhood. With devastating precision, Dickey walks the reader through a new season of uprootedness and loss; she mourns the end of her marriage, the death of her mother, the decline of her father. With each poem and each step, with each word and each breath, the poet charts the daily weather of grief. Each poem is a delicate bowl, a hollow and a silence, into which she drops the words and images that slowly and steadily make life start to speak and sing again. These incandescent poems gutted and restrung me, and by the end of the book I was singing along.”
—REBECCA HOOGS, author of Self Storage, Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures

“We brim with stories we must tell that we must push beyond silence. We walk alone yet crowded. Ruth Dickey’s expansive poems blossom with the opening of intimacy, that sharp feeling toward what we owe to each other. Even when we reach a painful threshold of memory, from the traction from the past, we bless each other toward song. Our hollowness sings reminds us of the peculiar generosity that every poet shares with her readers—how the imagination is a small miracle for remembering, blessing us till we glow.”
—RICARDO MALDONADO, President & Executive Director, Academy of American Poets

“Praise the fragile world and Ruth Dickey’s Our hollowness sings. These tender poems look forward and backwards, reckoning with absence and presence, loneliness and loss, wonder and joy. In Dickey’s masterful work, beauty is everywhere—even in the dark corners of our grief: in bougainvillea and gardenias, in scratch tickets and a pet monkey, umbrellas and Jello salads. The way the heart tears and mends itself over and over and over again—every word is an astonishment. These stunning poems are intimate, honest, and profound. It is Dickey’s most powerful book to date.”
—JANUARY GILL O’NEIL, author of Glitter Road

Originally from North Carolina, RUTH DICKEY is a writer and cultural worker based in Brooklyn, NY, who has spent 30 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. She is a recipient of the Mayor’s Arts Award from Washington, DC, and an individual artist grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Her first book, Mud Blooms, was selected for the MURA Award from Harbor Mountain Press (2019), and awarded a 2020 Silver Nautilus for Books that Build a Better World. Her poems have recently appeared in Cave Wall, Kestrel, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rhino, SWIMM, storySouth, Vice Versa, and Zocalo Public Square. Ruth holds an MFA in poetry from UNC Greensboro, and a BS in Foreign Service and an MA in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University. She is a voracious reader, an ardent fan of dogs and coffee, and was a co-founder of mothertongue: DC women’s spoken word. Ruth began her career as a teaching artist, leading poetry workshops in soup kitchens, drop-in centers, and the DC Public Schools, and she currently serves as the Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. More at ruthdickey.com.