Out now from Beacon, a National Poetry Series winner selected by Victoria Chang and shortlisted for the 2024 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, Sweet Movie confronts romantic and religious masochism to interrogate spiritual, sexual, and moral agency.
“Each poem in this collection is like a speedboat at full throttle, simply vanishing when it ends.”
— Harriet, Sylee Gore
“The poems in Sweet Movie are wrought with beauty and being in the world.”
— Victoria Chang
“Alisha Dietzman is a love poet for the 21st century, a fierce, devoted sensualist who feeds on aesthetic experience. In Sweet Movie, she turns the usual story of human failing, the tale of our sin and transgression, into a festival of erotic abandon. In poems of devotion to still and moving images, Sweet Movie veers from feeling to thought to action, troubling the notion that a “viewer” could exist in any state of detachment. It's a book on the run – from men, from religion, from family, from legacies of violence against women - and it wants you along for the ride. And it's thrilling.”
— Katie Peterson
“The scene opens to a person teetering on a high wire between two trees in a forest that used to be a city. Below, another person gathers a host of paintings that once hung in a museum that no longer exists in the city that used to be a city. That person looks up, knowing that civilization is over, knowing that they love that person on the high wire, and that something new is only just beginning. That’s the movie I would make of Sweet Movie—a taut and haunting book of love and faith when, all around us, hate and nihilism crowd in.”
— Philip Metres
“‘I didn’t expect the desert, its longform,’ writes Alisha Dietzman in her lustrous debut Sweet Movie, a collection centered around ekphrasis. TV, movies, the self, even art and religion, serve as mediums on which the speaker casts the light of consciousness in her search for meaning. Despite the spectrum of experience presented, this is a poetry that proves, ‘At our vertices: God.’”
— Quan Barry
“The prevalent theme is faith, and the book’s title comes from the 1974 Dušan Makavejev film of the same name. Readers are often asked to contemplate who God is to them, both individually and collectively as a society. (…) A rich and thought-provoking collection.”
— Library Journal, Sarah Michaelis