paper • 88 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-961897-80-9
eISBN: 978-1-961897-81-6
March 2026 • Poetry
If You Would Let Me uses the myth of Persephone and Demeter to explore, in an utterly contemporary idiom, the hellish descents and unequivocal love of a mother and an adolescent child. The old story is reimagined in new terms—a present-day Persephone’s cycles of psychic affliction giving rise to botched facial piercings, social media ghostings, and squalls of physical fury—and revoiced in poems that sing Demeter’s rage, the depths of maternal grief, the seasons of erasure and renewal. In an electric transposition of classic lore onto modern descriptive modes, Dietz casts the imperiling pubescence and anxiety of middle school as canonically significant and dangerously chimerical: “Persephone and her friends brought / Waxed paper cups of ice cream / To the meadow by the river,” where “Their laughter made ripples a heron / Mistook for alewives underwater” while “Under some of their shirts” grew “The first hiccups of puffy nipples.” Throughout these teenage transformations and the distances they grow, Dietz remains as constant as a lodestar, offering unwavering light for her child to see by in order to return. “You must know what I mean even if / You do not know you know: Child, // When you called my name I heard you / Though your cries could find no wind.” Formally meticulous and sonically intricate, these poems hear as much as they make themselves heard, harnessing ancient energies to create a picture of our recycled world—a story for our own times, one not only familiar but perennially, timelessly true.
Don’t Go
Autumn reminds us with numb precision
It isn’t safe to love.
Its arias of attrition intone
Our fated anguish.
You reap sings the pungent
Field what you sow.
I swear I was just snipping daffodils, surprising
You with a jar of them on your desk!
Remember that? And when you said you
Loved me more than the green of summer?
Ironies abound. The absconding songbirds
Chitter about chickens coming home.
The morning glories double down,
Trumpeting purple across the trellis.
Why must my grief
Be the gate
You leave through, frozen
Ajar on its ancient hinges?
The act of describing Maggie Dietz’s latest book of poems, her infinitely artful and most deft, If You Would Let Me, demands superlatives. The volume is such a terrifyingly eloquent depiction of what it feels to see your child through harrowing times. On reading it, I often feared I must put it down, simply because I might cry tears I have refused to allow myself for years. Which is why I insist: of all the poetry books you read this year, Dietz’s latest work should and must rise to the top of your list.
What a spectacular collection! The poems in If You Would Let Me—absorptive, intimate, earthy, full-throated—shatter the glass; many of them face full on the fragilities, tenderness, and violence of loving. The passages of motherhood are sharp-edged but underscored here with an incomparable music. Maggie Dietz arrives strikingly ready to braid her lines to her forebears, a book, in its entirety, that sings a healing song for us all.