Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians

What is gay about the weather? Queer about gardening? Feminist about recovery? Lesbian about every piece of art? The poems in Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians move through the natural world, the political moment, literary lineage, and a domestic space, built piece by piece by two wives, to claim their rightful place at the center of poetry itself. Would the mentors and guides and ghosts referenced in these poems-many of them situated at the center of heteropatriarchal midcentury America-be able to clock Nicole Santalucia's radical, full flowering? Maybe. Poetry has always been a complicated paradise, and we are lucky to have a new way in. -Laura Cronk, author of Ghost Hour

Editorial Reviews

Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians is a book about translation ("I have translated Sappho into ladybug") and transformation where "the difference between naked and nude is candied fruit." The poet inhabits an animated queer universe where creatures and objects speak, and her own fluid being shifts shape in songs of cohabitation. It is also a book about gardening, growth, and the people and ideas that nourish us. In fact, it is a sort of cookbook where Santalucia combines bitter, sour, salty, and sweet words with wit and wild originality for maximum poetry umami. This collection has something to satisfy even the most discriminating literary palate. -Elaine Equi, author of Out of the BlankNicole Santalucia's Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians is a sustained, irreverent celebration. This surreal, wildly imaginative and wildly associative collection pays tribute to queer ancestors and traces a poetic lineage to Sappho, Mary Oliver, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Ruth Stone, Robert Duncan, and Ashbery again, among many others. All the while Santalucia insists on a new post-confessional poetic full of absurdist humor, wit, and probing insight. Often prose-driven and accessible even it its wilding, the work is part chiastic rewriting, and part unspooling manifesto that foregrounds lesbian power and joy while queering heteronormative culture and discovering the primal, fablelike interconnectedness of species, environment, and art. A great read. An ambitious, daring, and unsettling achievement.

-Peter Covino, translator of What Sex Is Death

Nicole Santalucia's Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians evokes the wonder and difficulty of the domestic present through its playful language and innovative form. This is a book bursting with evidence of the wild landscape of a lesbian body growing older, one which demands witness and conversation.ching-in chen, author of Shiny CityLesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians. Technically, that's math. And while the singular elements in Nicole Santalucia's poems are never interchangeable, they do contain multitudes-both the torso and the severed head. Does it feel good to be always all: a haunted self and a boobied gardening dinosaur? Oh, hell no. So what's the alternative? Be simple? ". . . purple in plain speech is how I imagine testicles." Be cold? "I no longer deny my whale heart." Be [gulp] quiet? "This exhilaration would have turned into pain, had I not been able to share it with you."Good luck with that. Best to pull on your Lesbian Dinosaurs/Dinosaur Lesbians pants, lob some blubber, and feel it all-from rage and shame to gratitude, love, and awe.-Jennifer L. Knox, author of Crushing ItStrap yourself in for a ride that is Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians, and you won't be sorry-though I can't guarantee that the seatbelt won't leave bruises. This book is a centrifuge of awesome, an oscillation between zero gravity lightness and G forces that feel like they might flatten you like a pancake. This is a spiky adventure of queer formal innovation, whipsmart imagery, and a relationship to the body that Andre Breton would find disorienting. Just pick up the book. You won't put it down.

-Jason Schneiderman, author of Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire

About the Poet

Nicole Santalucia is the author of three poetry collections: Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press, 2015), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press, 2018), and The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books, 2020). Her awards include the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize, and the Arkana Literary Review Editor's Choice Award, with honorable mentions for the Allen Ginsberg Award, the Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Contest, and the Oscar Wilde Award. She holds an MFA from The New School University and a PhD from Binghamton University, and is currently pursuing an MS in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. She is a Professor of English at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, where she also serves as Director of First-Year Writing and co-chair of the LGBTQ+ Advisory Council.