Em Dial, In the Key of Decay

 

Mamestra Brassicae

In the early spring, cabbage moths bloom,
a likely target of coos from my students,
whose hands I hold as I reach them the word
pupae. What an agent of evil I am, to dash
their hopes of the swarm drifting across
drafts of love, like Monarchs. The white
flock has descended on our broccoli,
our brussel sprouts, our collard greens,
to unleash a tsunami of hungry mouths
and I can’t lie to them. They aren’t butterflies.

I’m just now seeing a copy of Toronto-based poet Em Dial’s [see their ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] full-length debut, In the Key of Decay (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), a collection of lyrics held in monologue, gesture. I’d seen Dial’s poems recently in Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025) [see my review of such here] and was impressed, although I’d even think their poem included in that particular anthology a direction I’d like to see further. Their poems in this collection are a narrative blend of performative and meditative, offering elements of beauty and decay and everything between, amid and through, a collection, as the back cover offers, that “pushes past borders both real and imagined to attend to those failed by history.” “In my worst nightmares,” the poem “On Beauty” begins, “I am pregnant / my body swelling out / with a demon        but a small task to country. // Just as when awake, I am begging / myself into a somewhere        thumbing / my ribs for the definition of country / other than the two blue passports / kissing in the desk drawer.” The poems in In the Key of Decay are declarative, considered. In the Key of Decay is a solid opening, and I’m intrigued by Dial’s formal considerations, pushing against the boundaries of lyric constraint, but one open to further possibilities (such as their poem in Permanent Record, which does move into some really interesting structural territory). The poems are smart and wild and restrained, offering elements of fantastic monologues and short scenes and lines that lean into the musical, as “Lost in the World” offers:

My chest ticks          to the rhythm

of a frenzied compass.          Where are we again?

Maybe all the generations          dressed in

Immigration because lost         and          love

are as universal as          a drum beat.