DARK BEDS

“Diana Whitney’s poems are luminous and exacting, skating the line between danger and pleasure, motherhood and desire. Dark Beds is a lush book—of the body and the world—that boldly reckons with the ways we’re inextricably tethered to nature and to each other.”
— Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk

“Dark Beds is a bewitching and enchanting mystical place in what Yeats referred to as ‘the deep heart’s core.’ These poems delineate the lives we plant, grow, and endure through the symphony of the four seasons. From the sexual urgency of spring and the critical overthinking of winter, Whitney’s stunning, beautiful, feminist poems lead us into the magical and sometimes dark natural world, where we find a mirror and metaphor for our wildest, deepest selves, a place where family is the immediate and universal, a way to find solace and strength in a brutal but beautiful world.”
— Elizabeth Powell, author of Atomizer

“The poems in Dark Beds are nearly pyroclastic with ice, lunches for the children, dreams of what might be, and the action of being in the extra/ordinary throes of a meaningfull life—as a mother, a person, a poet, a mind-spirit. This imagistic and incredibly attentive, sensitive, and insightful book maps a maze of how to live and what to do . . . “what if why not what if how come?” These beds (of flowers, of asleep and awake) are of darkness and light, and fertile with matter—the problem (that life ends) and the substance of (living) forever.”
— Matt Hart, author of FAMILIAR