Sweet Movie’s love poems and ekphrasis echo splintered versions of the same question: how do we navigate a world where the expectations of our performance—our presentation, our means of existence—are dictated by the viewers themselves? Mirroring the uncertain, unstable tenor of Dušan Makavajev’s controversial avant-garde film Sweet Movie (1974), the voices in Sweet Movie are equal parts docile, feverish, and violent. This collection reimagines a feminist approach to religious masochism to explore the ways women are denied agency by both their faith communities and by outsiders.
Dietzman’s poems move through locations across Central Europe and the American South. Each new landscape informs the next: Memphis appears in Berlin in the form of a dead deer, and Southern syntax haunts an elegy for Gustavs Klucis. The inspired poems from Sweet Movie use film and art to break open seeing. What results are deeply insightful and spacious poems of faith, displacement, and love. Perpetually observant, Sweet Movie guardedly but desperately consumes a world that has become unsettling and uncertain.
Alisha Dietzman is joining us on the virtual Busboys stage for a celebration event to discuss her newest release SWEET MOVIE:POEMS in conversation with fellow poet Adrienne Chung. Copies of SWEET MOVIE: POEMS and ORGANS OF LITTLE IMPORTANCE, Chung's new book, will be available for purchase before and during the event, so make sure to order your copy before we’re out of stock! Your purchase of the book includes shipping anywhere in the United States via USPS.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of SWEET MOVIE will be available for purchase before and during the event. Please note that this event is VIRTUAL and will ONLY be livestreamed.
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Alisha Dietzman (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Divinity focusing on aesthetics and ethics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, supported by a grant from the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Her chapbook, Slow Motion Something For No Reason, was the editors’ choice selection for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Iowa Review. Raised between Columbia, South Carolina, and Prague, Czech Republic, Dietzman now works as a bartender and adjunt professor in Oregon.
Adrienne Chung (she/her) is the author of Organs of Little Importance (Penguin 2023), a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her work has been published in The Yale Review, Joyland, Recliner, and elsewhere. A recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from UW-Madison. Based in Berlin, she teaches at the Berlin Writers' Workshop and is a poetry editor at Sand Journal.
