Ted Dodson: An Orange

“It would be too easy to say love vanished from the earth…” begins Ted Dodson’s ‘An Orange’, his thoughtful, experiential second collection of poems. It’s a provocation to which ‘An Orange’ wholeheartedly responds. Dodson’s work reroutes essay, narrative, and confessionalism, detouring from criticism into bisexual desire and navigating modernity as fluently as it imagines speculative destinations for language. From the graceful realism of the opening travelogues to its final long poem, “The Language the Sky Speaks,” ‘An Orange’ guides memory and affect into cosmopolitan forms: disalienating, expansive, and tonic.