Sweet Movie: Poems

This new poetry collection by divinity scholar Dietzman (Slow Motion Something for No Reason) is a National Poetry Series winner. The prevalent theme is faith, and the book’s title comes from the 1974 Dušan Makavejev film of the same name. Readers are often asked to contemplate who God is to them, both individually and collectively as a society. The influence of artists Timur Novikov and Marlene Dumas and the HBO series Big Love is also evident in several poems. A highlight of Dietzman’s language is: “And the blue background of the nightly news/ is a holy sonnet of bodies battered, badly, and maybe after/ looking God in the eye” (from the poem “Thou Holdest Mine Eyes Waking”), while in “Gosha Rubchinskiy X Timur Novikov,” the world of “Untitled” by Novikov is described as “Everything is so delicate in this world,/ I imagine God would be a spoon/ Even the infinite rendered a girl, snow.”