Books
Dark Beds
June Road Press, 2023
READ THE LATEST PRESS HERE
“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
You Don’t Have to Be Everything
Workman Publishing, 2021
Amazon / Barnes & Noble / IndieBound /
Bookshop / Everyone’s Books, VT
Winner of the 2022 Claudia Lewis Award
READ THE LATEST PRESS HERE
“This collection feels like a gift, a pep talk, a shoulder to cry on, and, most of all, a mirror that will captivate its audience.”
- Kirkus Reviews
“Varied and vibrant... the collection pulses with a vital and confident energy, embracing contradictions and complexity.”
- The Boston Globe
“The poems in this gorgeous book glitter like stars, like sequins, like a blade. And they constitute an invitation to our girls to be free — to be whole. How breathtakingly precious that is! How devastatingly rare. I am reminded (again and again) that art is here to save our lives.”
- Catherine Newman, author of How to Be a Person
“What company this book would have provided me if I could have had it when I was young! The poems sing and celebrate, mourn and commiserate, question and assert. The smartly-edited collection displays the tremendous vitality and diversity of women poets today and offers a soulful read for ‘girls becoming themselves’ at any age, even my own.” - Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
"This is such a beautiful gathering of voices, such a beautiful gathering of poems. If I had had this book when I was younger, it would have enriched my life. But I’m so incredibly grateful I get to read it, and be changed by it, now."
- Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights
Wanting It
Harbor Mountain Press, 2014
Order: paperback / e-book
Read selected poems from the collection HERE
WINNER OF THE 2015 RUBERY BOOK AWARD IN POETRY
Praise for Wanting It
“Behind Diana Whitney’s debut collection of poetry Wanting It is a tremulous spirit full of wonder and imaginative agitation. Her poems are ancient secrets that luxuriate as much in the natural world as they do in the ancient sources and songs of her forebears and our wondrous lives as humans who desire and love. Such an abundance of torrential light will be felt long after this book is read.”
– Major Jackson, author of Razzle, Dazzle
“This is a collection full of surprises, visceral and musical, physical and intellectual. Here is a poet in full command of the craft, but writing with such passion that ‘craft’ is the last thing we notice. The leaps and confessions of these speakers offer a thrill ride for the reader, but the sound never falters, and Diana Whitney doesn’t write what’s not worth quoting. Who can do that? This poet can and does. WANTING IT is one of the finest collections I’ve read in a very long time.”– Laura Kasischke, author of Where, Now
“Readers will scarcely miss the erotic element in Diana Whitney’s saucily entitled and brilliant book; but only witless ones will conflate the erotic here with the pornographic, for the author’s lust is so manifestly omni-inclusive. Whitney craves the natural world, in both its benign and malign aspects… but her hungry heart and eye invade her entire universe to such an extent that, if it did not exist, we should have to invent the adjective charged. These poems virtually leap at us from the page. What a debut!”
– Sydney Lea, former Vermont Poet Laureate and author of Here