Poems
Links to more than a hundred of Dodds’ poems, that you can read without any cost or hassle.
Heaven Unbuilt is the sum of roughly ten years of Dodds’ work as a poet. The poems wander the hallucinatory frontiers of experience to the dangerous, unlikely moments of insight for which readers had feared themselves too decent, too well liked and too cautious. The hefty tome encompasses Spill-O’s fitful travels toward grace, down the streets of Brooklyn, over the mountains and across the deserts of the American West, through casinos and churches, to a long interlude in a bar, through grief and into the slow, sometimes reluctant submission to love. The poems in this collection have been published in more than two hundred publications.
“These are very good poems. For moments I could even feel the old feelings when I read them.”
-David Berman
(Spill-O), a poetic alter-ego or astral double along the lines of John Berryman’s Henry, leaps the ramparts of humility to engage the creatures whose shadows shape our days. More grandiose than polite poetry permits, more conniving than a dissipated innocent would attempt and more venomous than mysticism would seem to allow, Spill-O’s honest explorations animate these poems with the heartfelt, desperate love of things that neither he nor anyone can necessarily justify or defend.
Wisdom’s Real Opposite—101 Poems about an Odyssey on a Stool consists of more than ten years of poems written in and about bars. Impossible hopes collide with shabby realities in both starkly lucid and deeply distorted moments. Funny poems that avoid being a comedy routine; severe and extreme poems that maintain sympathy and humanity. Taken together, they represent what the best of books promise—something better than drinking alone.
Can’t Stay the Night—Poems and lyrics written between 2000 and 2006.
The Blue Blueprint is the 2003 literary sensation about the September 11 attacks, the shape of the world and of ourselves, the struggle to love, and the introduction of Spill-O.
