Dogma by Nancy Devine

The poems in Dogma are a parable. It is the book of a deity all too aware of her need for devotees and so equally devotes her worship to her worshipers. The speaker’s obsession with collecting animals is immediately fervent. “He is a hunger I’ve never seen,/ though it devours me daily/ in long swallows I can’t climb” and she is desperate for ascension. “…when the pups mewl like the dead,/ I know I can never let them go.” But her adoration goes too far as her canine followers grow in number, seemingly seeking her out. “I’ve lost track of keeping track,/ without beads to count/ pushed by mouths to feed.” When at last she loses them to intervention, she finds herself angry, empty and wanting, having been so close once to heaven: “I dream the gods close and each one takes my hand.”

—Rhiannon Conley, author of Less Precious (Semiperfect Press, 2017)

Dogma by Nancy Devine, is a tragic love story unfolding in the margins of our modern world made visible in the beam of a flashlight. The title is both the discovery of articles of faith in a cold and faithless world and “Dog/Ma” the narrator who takes on the world in the most revolutionary and quiet of ways, by loving the unloved. She finds the abandoned canine companions to be good company. Words mean something here. A March “sky posts its advertisement” as she takes in a pregnant collie in from the new snow, “in a different sleep/I tender./I dream the gods close.” But the world of inhuman humans invades their sanctuary all too soon.

–Jessica Lindsley is an author, powerlifter and artist who grew up in North Dakota before the oil boom. Her written work has appeared in Thirteen Myna Birds, DEAD SNAKES and cryopoetry.