Photograph by Marshall Franklin Long
Tyler Flynn Dorholt is a writer and visual artist born in Minnesota. American Flowers (Dock Street Press) is his first full-length book. Some of his chapbooks include: Side Cars and Road Sides (forthcoming) and The Point or What I Cannot Recall, both from Greying Ghost Press, as well as Modern Camping, a winner of the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. An editor and publisher of the print journal Tammy, as well as the film and poetry journal On the Escape, Tyler lives in Syracuse, New York with his wife, Katie, and their son.
Advanced praise for American Flowers
"The American epic has long laid its firmest foundations in unusual and unexpected terrain, from the silk districts of the good doctor's Paterson, NJ, to the scorched optimism dotting Ronald Johnson's Kansas prairies. What a pleasure to be able to add Tyler Flynn Dorholt’s American Flowers to this gazetteer. For here is a book—and make no mistake: this is a book as much as it is a collection of poems—which tracks the heroism our collective moment desperately needs but hardly deserves. Equal parts documentary and phenomenology, American Flowers is an experiment in pragmatism. What if we could truly feel the abstractions that exert such powerful if invisible pressures on daily existence? What if particles and their attractions were fundamentally interchangeable? What if a lone paragraph, or a single sentence, could contain both skyscrapers and forests; a sonnet's play and a bulletin's urgency? What if we demolished the future and found in its rubble the history we need to advance, and towards realizing a present in which “it gets to be as it never was”? Muscular, intricate, dazzling, simultaneously homeopathic and ardent, the constantly reinventing and cross-pollinating language to be encountered in these pages is enduring in the most unostentatious sense of the word. American Flowers is a gift to lyricism itself."
--Joe Milazzo, author of Crepuscule W/Nellie (Jaded Ibis Press) and The Habiliments (Apostrophe Books)