Tory Dent captured the patient’s sense of alienation from themselves and others
IN THE POEM “Fourteen Days in Quarantine” Tory Dent reflects on her stint on a tuberculosis ward in New York. While a snowstorm blows outside, scores of doctors and nurses—masked for protection, “bodies with just eyes”—scurry around her. When Dent’s boyfriend visits, she notes “the thick cardboard material of the/quarantine mask which we would defiantly indent in order to kiss”. Observing herself in the glass of a TV screen, her reflection “refuses to echo back what signifies reality to me”.
Dent’s poetry chronicles her experience of HIV/AIDS, which was diagnosed when she was 30. Her work enjoyed critical acclaim during her lifetime but has gone largely unread since her death in 2005. Dent published three collections—“What Silence Equals” , “HIV, Mon Amour” and “Black Milk” —of which two are out of print; internet searches reveal only a handful of obituaries, social-media posts and reviews.
Dent describes an awful routine of symptoms, medication, reactions and pain—pain which frequently resists Dent’s attempts to describe it, even in new or surprising ways. In “The Interfaith Chapel at New York Hospital”, Dent, struggling to verbalise an intense allergic response, makes a “noise like an animal hurt on the road”. In “When Atheists Pray” she considers “each level of the disease”: “the gradations of physical recession,/the lungs, the gut, the eyes, the brain—systems of torture”.
In its willingness to lay bare her awful experiences as a patient, Dent’s writing is forceful and uncompromising. Her poems often prioritise lyricism over clarity, and her use of language can be intimidating and difficult to follow. Critics have considered her poetry an expression of vigour and rage, but this emphasises the personal element of her work at the expense of the political.
Dent gives the reader a sense of what it might be like “to be dying/but not to die”, as she says in “The Defeat of Linear Thinking”, or to live perched on the precipice between being well and sick. What is most striking about her poetry is the way in which she allows seemingly contradictory impulses to coexist, contemplating her illness in the present even as she plans for the future.
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