The Dog's Letter

The Dog’s Letter

May 2026

The Dog’s Letter

$14.00

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"Urgent, intimate, and crushing, The Dog's Letter marks a daring exploration from an exceptional new voice."
— Rob Macaisa Colgate

Details

The Dog’s Letter is a sequence of sounds and silences recovered from the troughs of caring for a child with terminal illness. A pattern of voices traces the contours of a yellow zone, between the blank spaces of a ward to the exhaustion of the first person. In the heat the child Maya emerges, refusing reprieve. Minimal and arthritic verses swim beneath a fragile surface in anticipation of a puncture.

Author

Timothy Ashley Leo

is an editor for dialogist. His work appears in AnnuletConjunctionsDenver QuarterlyLana TurnerNat. Brut and Of Latitudes Unknown: James Baldwin’s Radical Imagination. He serves as a member of the surgical house staff at the University of Chicago. 

Praise

"In these astute, perceptive, and engaged litanies, our speaker navigates the challenge of cataloguing impending loss: loss of a child, loss of a sense of self, and loss of time before another greater loss arrives. Attending closely to both the body and the world that must contain it, these poems move with steady and harrowing observation. The sequence's central reckoning is between the fallibilities of parenthood and a parent's own humanity: 'I wondered how he lost our child // when I had her / so firmly between my teeth.' These poems ask at once to 'Carry this body / to the bed, remove the hurt, and try, / try to leave in the life' while also hoping that the material world might show enough grace to 'let my child who needs to fall / fall free.' Urgent, intimate, and crushing, The Dog's Letter marks a daring exploration from an exceptional new voice."
— Rob Macaisa Colgate

Excerpt

from “Of or Pertaining to the Dog Days”

 

“I am a who-am,” Maya says

as she slips into her skin, “I

am a fish—a guppy—a snake

and a kitchen, a chased-by-

mother-round the table, a chair

tied to a child”  “I will not open

my mouth”  “I will bite back the

universe”  “I will swallow”

“I will smile”  “I 

will—” she stands on tip-toes and

reaches in the freezer for the push-pops

Details

, 48pp, W:6in x H:8in
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
Distribution: ,