Chelsea Dingman
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chelsdingman.bsky.social
Chelsea Dingman
@chelsdingman.bsky.social
1.4K followers 1.2K following 130 posts
Author of Thaw (@ugapress 2017 National Poetry Series) Through a Small Ghost (@ugapress 2020) I, Divided (@lsupress 2023) PhD Candidate @ualberta Poetry editor @sweetliterary
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Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
hanvanderhart.bsky.social
“No.” is a sentence.
nkalamb.bsky.social Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 4d
Nothing to see here other than a university telling its research community that AI can appropriately be used to "generate first drafts."

unbcloud.sharepoint.com/sites/AI-at-...
How AI Can Support Your Research Efficiency Automate routine or repetitive tasks, freeing up more time for experiments, analysis, and discovery. Creativity Spark new ideas, explore alternative approaches, or generate first drafts to move past the “blank page.” Clarity Translate complex data, technical language, or lengthy findings into clear summaries for colleagues, partners, or broader audiences. Organization Turn research notes, articles, or meeting discussions into structured summaries, action items, or literature maps. Accessibility Develop research outputs that are more inclusive and easier to share with collaborators, students, and the wider UNB community.
February 12, 2026 at 4:24 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
New poem in the Winter issue of The Indianapolis Review. Thank you to Natalie Solmer for including me along w/ all the other stunning work in this issue.

theindianapolisreview.com
If it is Not Only the Moment of the Event But the Passing Out of it That is Traumatic, Survival Itself Can Be a Crisis No lights on, my Baba sits in her living room, telling me about the end of the world. I am alone there. My father dropped me off two hours from home when he went away to work. July, merciless in the heat of the valley near Kamloops. The sagebrush, under the sky's weight, sulks. The world burns as smoke from wildfires along the Pacific coast consume the city. Outside, she sees a war instead. The old country. She will not see her parents again. She will not see her husband who drank himself to death after two of their children died. My father will die within a year. An unmarked shoulder of highway will testify to the existence only of time. I will grow my hair like loneliness. Memory will become the address lost with my father's body. If I had loved myself too? When the TV quieted at night. When the fires reached the doors.
February 12, 2026 at 6:40 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
pdforan.bsky.social
"To stay alive, even the dead must endure / temporariness. Despite disease. Despite the burden, by which I mean / a refrain. Its vows."

@chelsdingman.bsky.social in @therumpus.net therumpus.net/2026/02/02/r...
Given Limits Exist, Streets, Oblivion - The Rumpus
I don’t want to be at peace. Outside, the buffalograss rails at the houses. Terracotta storms the bougainvillea. Each street in any direction is directionless. I’m beginning
therumpus.net
February 3, 2026 at 3:27 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
therumpus.net
"To stay alive, even the dead must endure / temporariness."

From "Given Limits Exist, Streets, Oblivion," a new poem by @chelsdingman.bsky.social.

➡️ buff.ly/EBzGLxN
The cited quote and information written in black against a sky blue off-white background. The full Rumpus logo is at the top.
February 3, 2026 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
melostrom.bsky.social
“What is death/ if not a dream of distance?”

This stunner by @chelsdingman.bsky.social in @therumpus.net.💙
chelsdingman.bsky.social Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 14d
I’ve got a new poem up @therumpus.net today. Thank you to Saeed Jones & editors for giving it such a wonderful home.
Given Limits Exist, Streets, Oblivion I don't want to be at peace. Outside, the buffalograss rails at the houses. Terracotta storms the bougainvillea. Each street in any direction is directionless. I'm beginning to think the concreteness that I seek in theory is waking each day, walking along a tree-lined pond. Today, approaching a fallen aspen, my child turns to me and asks, do you want to live forever? Beyond April, trees are wildfire. The child is a stranger I held in a blood museum once. Our narrative, one of proximities. I like to imagine I knew aloneness before I was occupiable. Reterritorialization: a migration from within desire (or do I mean language?) —reality's jumble of tenses & imagined borders. Something must give. I have everything I thought I wanted, still I'm incurably lonely in the way of capitalism or an abandoned child. In the only photo I have of my dead father, the image refuses identity. Whom I can or cannot remember I murder or save. To stay alive, even the dead must endure temporariness. Despite disease. Despite the burden, by which I mean a refrain. Its vows. Without her child, today, a young friend calls home a chapel of wet grass. The black trees. Absence. And what of the symbolon? That unpronounceable name transmitted as a promise that connects touch to a touchable silence. Sometimes, I think pain is a world I am too tired to carry. A creek, creeklight. The bee crawling on a rope in the basement I crushed this morning. Lest, beestung on a Tuesday in some future June, I arrive. Last words: the rain falling through the child. My body, failing to imagine me. Asking to be known. What is death if not a dream of distance? I wish I could see my child to the end of their life and not see them die.
February 3, 2026 at 2:55 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
I’ve got a new poem up @therumpus.net today. Thank you to Saeed Jones & editors for giving it such a wonderful home.
Given Limits Exist, Streets, Oblivion I don't want to be at peace. Outside, the buffalograss rails at the houses. Terracotta storms the bougainvillea. Each street in any direction is directionless. I'm beginning to think the concreteness that I seek in theory is waking each day, walking along a tree-lined pond. Today, approaching a fallen aspen, my child turns to me and asks, do you want to live forever? Beyond April, trees are wildfire. The child is a stranger I held in a blood museum once. Our narrative, one of proximities. I like to imagine I knew aloneness before I was occupiable. Reterritorialization: a migration from within desire (or do I mean language?) —reality's jumble of tenses & imagined borders. Something must give. I have everything I thought I wanted, still I'm incurably lonely in the way of capitalism or an abandoned child. In the only photo I have of my dead father, the image refuses identity. Whom I can or cannot remember I murder or save. To stay alive, even the dead must endure temporariness. Despite disease. Despite the burden, by which I mean a refrain. Its vows. Without her child, today, a young friend calls home a chapel of wet grass. The black trees. Absence. And what of the symbolon? That unpronounceable name transmitted as a promise that connects touch to a touchable silence. Sometimes, I think pain is a world I am too tired to carry. A creek, creeklight. The bee crawling on a rope in the basement I crushed this morning. Lest, beestung on a Tuesday in some future June, I arrive. Last words: the rain falling through the child. My body, failing to imagine me. Asking to be known. What is death if not a dream of distance? I wish I could see my child to the end of their life and not see them die.
February 2, 2026 at 9:15 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
glasspoetry.bsky.social
Advanced praise for Opening by Stefanie Kirby (@msstefaniekirby.bsky.social) by Chelsea Ding an (@chelsdingman.bsky.social) and Sara Moore Wagner (@saramoorewagner.bsky.social)!

www.glass-poetry.com
"Stefanie Kirby's chapbook, Opening, will open you like 'a highway,' 'a window,' 'a second mouth / filled with birds,' a cracked landscape. Kirby directly confronts the strange irony of living in a body which 'gives birth to death,' the uncanny after-reality of miscarriage. This is a transformational unfurling through and past the body. Kirby blends the body with the living world until the pain of being alive after a loss sits somewhere in the chest. In these vivid, surreal, and often fabulist poems, 'Drought brings up / shipwrecks like a body emptying itself / of bones.' Every poem aches and burns. 'Mary Magdalene turns / to smoke, bones soft / as incense.' Kirby, a master of the surreal, continually writes the wombed body in revolutionary and enchanting ways. Opening left me open to the bone." — Sara Moore Wagner, author of Lady Wing Shot "Stefanie Kirby's Opening speaks unsentimentally to the horror and grief related to miscarriage and stillbirth, instead reveling in the almost-fantastical rituals of the mind and body undergoing such experiences. Each poem is locked in its tiny little box, as if the poem is one place that even absence might not escape. Under pressures of form, Kirby's vivid and sensuous descriptions of loss and longing are even more haunting for what they cannot control. The tension between the living and the dead, thin as a uterine wall. In the 'smaller field' of a poem, unlike that of the body, 'there's no limit to all / it can hold.' A poem can never be emptied, though it too is inhabited by the deaths it births. How else to attend to the memory of that which has little trace? The brevity of Kirby's collection thus brilliantly reflects the brevity of a life unlived. Each poem, brief as a breath, and as wondrous." — Chelsea Dingman, author of Through a Small Ghost
January 11, 2026 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
forgottenpoets.bsky.social
From 'Five Poems'
—Humberto Ak'abal (tr. Michael Bazzett)

#poetry #poem #poems
The River Kneeling on a mat, bent over a stone, my mother washes and washes and washes. My little sister sleeps in a basket covered in willow leaves. Me? I am sitting on piled straw, watching how the water leaves and how the river stays.
November 19, 2025 at 12:38 AM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
susanlleary.bsky.social
Proof copy is here, and she’s lovely, so let this be a little reminder that MORE FLOWERS is out with @triohousepress.org in less than 3 months! You can pre-order at the link in the replies or wherever books are sold!

Here’s to more poetry and more flowers!
🌺🌸🌼
The poetry collection, More Flowers, resting against a vase of red carnations. ♥️🌸💐
November 16, 2025 at 6:53 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
neiu-cw.bsky.social
Remembering Alice Wong: Writer, Advocate, Friend
Though we were in frequent conversation for a decade, I only got to meet my friend Alice Wong in person just once. And when I did, I  was a bundle of nerves—and that was before she cussed me out wi…
lithub.com
November 18, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
melostrom.bsky.social
“only after breaking was my body/ believable”

This poem by @chelsdingman.bsky.social in @amsterdamreview.bsky.social is so beautiful. (Thanks for passing it along, @pdforan.bsky.social!)❤️
November 17, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
pdforan.bsky.social
“… You are a homesickness
buffered by fantasies of orchids, scotch

pines, daybreak. Blue
graves scattered over cities. People

I tried to love
but couldn’t. …”

@chelsdingman.bsky.social in @amsterdamreview.bsky.social www.amsterdamreview.org/we-have-know...
We Have Known Each Other at Every Hour by Chelsea Dingman | Amsterdam Review
Read "We Have Known Each Other at Every Hour" by Chelsea Dingman
www.amsterdamreview.org
November 16, 2025 at 9:23 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
neonpajamas.bsky.social
Ann Jäderlund

tr. by @johannesg.bsky.social
Out of the earth forest forest mountain river someone has time
November 16, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
susanlleary.bsky.social
Chelsea Dingman ♥️

“There is such violence / in the sunset.”

@chelsdingman.bsky.social
Sunset Do you forget the roar of tiny lungs unsettling your sleep? How I was once, a sparrow lost in the yard? Or was it safer for you to let him open new seams, your scars still so raw? I used to wake and run all of the faucets, as if we lived inside the falls. The house, lit like a constellation. Was I ever yours after that? There is such violence in the sunset. You wanted me to beg, but I held my breath as I wanted to be held. I should have said I wanted sky to claim the stars. That I understood to be a good girl I had to lie low like the aging hardwood floor. But, when I return, it's to stand in the soft light on the sun-porch. To admit the sunsets are drawn by my hand.
November 15, 2025 at 4:16 AM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
maureenthorson.bsky.social
“Carry me out / reel me in” A poem by Kevin Young.
GUTBUCKET I want, like water, you— something wet gainst the back of my throat. Carry me out reel me in I been down this well too long—
October 30, 2025 at 12:58 AM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
amsterdamreview.bsky.social
"Belief gave way / to grief, its purgatories. Who will look out for you / after you are grief enough / to believe in?"

A poem by 𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗹𝘀𝗲𝗮 𝗗𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗺𝗮𝗻 @chelsdingman.bsky.social in the Fall 2025 issue

bit.ly/AmsterdamReview

#poetry #poetrycommunity
At dusk, the dusk holds the days apart. I am also other than I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness, Simone Weil wrote at the onset of WWII. Still, this almost-hour. Its snows. All that I still have to lose. What grain, what glacier, what child, what plain did I hand my emptiness that I would feel full? Still, I don’t understand why
October 29, 2025 at 1:28 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
chenchenwrites.bsky.social
It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

—Louise Glück, from "October"
October 25, 2025 at 11:03 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
ofpoetrypodcast.bsky.social
Listen to Episode 79 with @sarahgreenpoet.bsky.social here: share.transistor.fm/s/23bf7d41

And read the full poem “Apostrophe” here: pioneerworks.org/broadcast/sa...

📚💙🎙️ #poetry #podcast #booksky
@uakronpress.bsky.social
from "Apostrophe" I know now, if I drive long enough, // yearning opens onto a smooth lake in the dark / where I can set down my lanterns like questions. Sarah Green
October 26, 2025 at 2:42 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
poetrydaily.bsky.social
Today's Featured Poem:

"The Bear" by @amiewhittemore.bsky.social from Nest of Matches published by @autumnhousepress.bsky.social

Read here:
poems.com/poem/the-bear/
The Bear
The bear came to me. I did not ask. I did not want.
poems.com
October 26, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
bookgaga.bsky.social
"My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold all of these?"

#TodaysPoem #poetry
What Is Home? by Mosab Abu Toha (2023 Literary Hub) lithub.com/where-is-mos...
Where is Mosab Abu Toha? A Poem from Gaza in 22 Languages
Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was reportedly detained in a mass arrest by the Israeli Defence Forces on the morning of November 20, 2023. He was at a checkpoint in Gaza traveling south toward the…
lithub.com
October 26, 2025 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
susanlleary.bsky.social
Ellen Bryant Voigt 💙
Practice Ellen Bryant Voigt To weep unbidden, to wake at night in order to weep, to wait for the whisker on the face of the clock to twitch again, moving the dumb day forward— is this merely practice? Some believe in heaven, some in rest. We'll float, you said. Afterward we'll float between two worlds— five bronze beetles stacked like spoons in one peony blossom, drugged by lust: it I came back as a bird I'd remember that— until everyone we love is safe is what you said.
October 24, 2025 at 7:15 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
darbylyons.bsky.social
Rest easy, Ellen Bryant Voigt.
Love her poetry, but these two offerings got me through my MFA thesis, and I'm forever grateful.
Book cover: The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song, by Ellen Bryant Voigt Book cover: Poets Teaching Poets Self and the World Edited by Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryant Voigt
October 24, 2025 at 9:12 PM
Reposted by Chelsea Dingman
forgottenpoets.bsky.social

From ‘This is from Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006’ (2007)
—Ellen Bryant Voigt 💔

#poetry #poem #booksky
After Keats I. If truth is not a thing apart from me, Then I don’t want it. II. —Have you always told the truth? I have always loved the truth.
October 24, 2025 at 9:12 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Ellen Bryant Voigt. 💔
Adagio We never said aloud: into the earth or fire. And if earth, then where. And if fire, then where to cast the ashes. Each thought the other would choose: choosing for two, not one— the body lying flat, the body left upright. And if a stone.
October 24, 2025 at 6:08 PM