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
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 HOFMANN
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
Electric Dress
Winner, Barrow Street Editor’s Prize
Barrow Street Press, 2026
