IN THE KEY OF DECAY, Em Dial

Em Dial

Poetry
ISBN-13: 978-1-990293-71-9
$21.95 CDN / $20.95 US | Trade Paperback
May 2024

Triangulated against the backdrop of a deteriorating world, In the Key of Decay pushes past borders both real and imagined to attend to those failed by history. Attuned to scientific racism, systemic medical failures, and climate change, Em Dial’s poems incisively carve out space for interrogation. Their place-finding and place-making is often surprising, centring care and desire, where Dial’s speaker “calls for someone to call me what I am and for that someone to be a lover, bare on silk sheets, inside walls of confidential lilac.” In the Key of Decay doesn’t just hum along, it sings.