Dancing in the Cobwebs by Dom Fonce

In poems that converge with nature and pay homage to family history, Dom Fonce’s chapbook Dancing in the Cobwebs explores mortality by capturing subtle moments of grace. For example, “Sonnet for Innocence” tells us that “a deer is born every second while / another dies curled up in rotting leaves,” and in “Grassman” a speaker states that “The things seen with child / eyes in backyards on backroads / are, at the very best, unreliable— / I understand this.” The rust belt landscape of Fonce’s collection delivers a welcome kind of heartbreak, an edge of tenderness along with a prayer for all that is lost.

–Mary Biddinger author of Department of Elegy, (Black Lawrence Press, 2022)

In Dom Fonce’s new chapbook, the natural world hums and looms—not as pastoral setting but as a force that is sometimes “Drunk and dangerous,” sometimes “sweet with marigold.” Fonce’s shadow terrain is inflected with crucified frogs, moth-dust, Puffer fish, and blackflies, as well as attic ghosts, Newports ashing themselves, and skin that can’t be washed off—ominous talismans that “reshape matter and mass.” This is a book that doesn’t flinch from the composing and decomposing of the sublunary and psychic landscapes it explores. Remarkably revealing about the pain of living in the midst of death, Dancing in the Cobwebs speaks with vatic overtones from a place where “what you’ve asked for can’t be told.

–Philip Brady, Head Director of Etruscan Press