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.

Em Dial is a writer born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto. Em is a Kundiman Fellow and recipient of the 2020 PEN Canada New Voices Award and 2019 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award. Their work can be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Arc Poetry Magazine, GASHER, and elsewhere. In the Key of Decay is their first book.

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Who, exactly, does naming serve? Em Dial’s visionary debut, In the Key of Decay, revolts against scientific authority and its easy answers. The aim is not to revel in the tragic, but instead, to triangulate legacies of loss. Unsettled by nomenclature, these poems implode the binary logics from which livelihoods wither. Where pathology, eugenics, and algorithms isolate us, Dial charts paths toward freer futures. Here is a poet whose lyrical precision and dextrous wit steward us through necropastorals, triptychs, anti-ekphrases, and the syntax of research. I can’t look away as Dial declares, “I’m a nightmare / of statehood, chemist against purity / and thus beauty.”

Chrysanthemum