All the Vessels, by Miranda Dennis

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. All the Vessels is a spiritual journey through the heart of Hollywood and the echoes of its long-dead Golden Age. Following a young woman as she traces her own provenance and encounters the spirit of her father’s friend, All the Vessels moves through the old architecture of fame: lavender marriages, secrecy, and the ever-present specter of death caught on celluloid. In these poems, the screen becomes a conduit through which the living and the dead speak. Our narrator awakens to her spiritual gifts, only to discover they are lonely, strange, and often banal. She bakes, entertains guests, and tests the limits of her new abilities, through spare, uncanny statements and half-investigations that make space for what can’t quite be named. All the Vessels invites you in the way a Ouija board does, and leaves you to puzzle out the mystery. Miranda Dennis is a multi-genre writer and product marketer, who resides in Brooklyn with a cat named after a very bad nun. She’s a board member of the Poetry Society of New York and co-hosts a Brooklyn-based reading series called Warm Bodies, if you ever want to catch her in the wild. Her work has been featured in Granta, the Hollins Critic, storySouth, Meridian, and more.