TRYING × TRYING: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025
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Pre-order Trying x Trying now at:
University of Chicago Press, Chicago Distribution Center Bookshop Amazon Ask your local bookstore to order Flourish; find a local bookstore here: Indiebound (USA) Booksellers Association (UK and Ireland) Booksellers NZ (New Zealand)  Cover art by Melissa Newman
Poetry that wrestles with language, loss, and resilience in times of crisis.
In Trying × Trying, Dora Malech dissects the language of our times; she turns over the familiar phrases of politics, parenthood, and pandemic to reveal what lies beneath. Through playing with the double meaning of “trying” as both perseverance and reproductive struggle, these poems navigate public and private spheres and interrogate the words we use to make sense of uncertainty and belief. With sharp lyricism and restless energy, Malech transforms language into prayer and protest. Sound bends, meanings shift, and repetition becomes a revelation as she traces the tensions between individual and collective experience. Trying × Trying is an enlightening meditation on persistence, reminding us that even in fractured times, poetry finds a way forward. |
"In Dora Malech’s Trying x Trying we encounter a speaker who brilliantly pinpoints the pulses and currents that undergird public and private spaces and events, the political, the ecological, parenting, and the self. These poems believe deeply in the power of words as spells, prayers, songs, and talismans—and they interrogate the nature of language itself as the nexus of existence, torquing and bending signifiers and sounds until they radiate with insight. There is a danger, a fire, a smolder beneath these poems and their dazzling beauty and music—this is a book of awareness, of light and growth and small gestures—a book of resilience that lets us deep into the speaker’s internal life, her contemplative strength and optimism."
— Erika Meitner, author of Useful Junk Reviews of Flourish:
Malech’s moving fifth collection (after Flourish) is a meditation on motherhood and loss in perilous times. Impressive in their attention to language, Malech’s poems interrogate “our moment’s um,” musically considering the complexities of the moment while reflecting on the challenges of writing itself. Rooted in close observation, these poems offer a practice that proves fraught: “wherever I look is looking away,” Malech writes. The collection grapples with the pandemic and a world in which “our list of what is gone goes on.” The speaker is acutely aware of the myriad dangers around them, of how “those mouths of ours that now—still/ now—are even deadly when we sing.” Despite the crises looming in the background, Malech finds room for tenderness and hope. In “For My Friend Who Is Tired of Children in Poems,” she writes: “let’s be sick of the sweetness of this world.” Malech stares into the void with wit and defiance, reminding the reader that “that roar you hear/ is just eternity.” It’s an inventive and gripping work. — Publishers Weekly |