Dick of the Dead

Poetry. DICK OF THE DEAD is an investigation into American sexual and political consciousness, and at its eccentric heart lies the undead and uneasy 37th president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. Also sifting the evidence (or implicated in its findings) are an experimental subject in a pink tutu, a Finnish gravedigger, an exiled Anglo-Saxon poet, and an industrious gang of fairies. Loden's Nixon is never merely the consummate villain deplored by his critics nor the tragic visionary statesman acclaimed by his apologists. He is nearly a force of nature: throwing off his gravestone in the garden at Yorba Linda, calling up his troops, his family, and even his black and white cocker spaniel, he is ready to smash death by any means necessary, to beat back a sea of pretenders and retake Washington by storm. DICK OF THE DEAD is a trip through the underworld of the American psyche, much funnier and ultimately much more serious than any one book of poems has a right to be.

Rachel Loden's book, DICK OF THE DEAD, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in May 2009. She is also the author of Hotel Imperium (Georgia), which won the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition and was shortlisted for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Loden has published four chapbooks, including The Last Campaign and The Richard Nixon Snow Globe. Her work has appeared in New American Writing, The Paris Review, Best American Poetry 2005, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, and many other magazines and anthologies. Loden's microplay, A Quaker Meeting in Yorba Linda, was performed in New York as part of Plays On Words: a Poets Theater Festival curated by Tony Torn, Lee Ann Brown and Corina Copp, produced in association with the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator and the Poetry Project. She has received a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Poetry from the California Arts Council, and a grant from the Fund for Poetry.