Danita Dodson
is an author, educator, and literary scholar from East Tennessee.
Her third collection of poetry, Between Gone and Everlasting, was released in May 2024.
Danita’s second book of poetry is The Medicine Woods, published in October 2022.
Her debut collection is Trailing the Azimuth, published in November 2021.
All three books are available are available from Wipf and Stock Publishers and other booksellers.
Photo Credit: Colby Collins
Between Gone and Everlasting
Danita Dodson writes with emotive transparency about loss, the passing of generations, and the love of a father whose memory becomes a source of light after his death. Between Gone and Everlasting pans the perimeters of mourning with a phenomenal scope: heartrending reflections on grief, tender odes of remembrance, stunning elegies about Appalachia’s fading past, and stirring psalms of spiritual awakening amid loss. Gracefully illustrating how the griever inhabits the umbral space between lamenting the gone and celebrating the everlasting, Dodson examines a central paradox: the irrevocable absence of the departed illuminates that which remains. In these poems, the past echoes inside the present with song-like rhythms, intricately threaded together with a warmth reminiscent of the quilts she describes. As the speaker commemorates her father’s presence in rural East Tennessee, she gathers images rooted in her sense of place and reverence of nature, revealing that the hills hold space for honoring loss, for remembering, and for seeing “light in the mourning.” In energic words that summon healing and tap into the universal human experience, Dodson makes the personal space a communal one, where grief becomes a sacred, creative act connecting the bereaved to the departed within poetry’s “thin place.”
The Medicine Woods
The Medicine Woods is a graceful and soul-stirring meditation on how our planet’s future lies in the ability to embrace the oneness of life and practice nonviolence toward each other, the trees, the seas, and all beings. In this second collection of awe-inspiring poetry, Danita Dodson uplifts the ecological stewardship that obliges us to seek healing in its many forms—to walk in the woods, to cure waters, to return the soil to its original state of health, to mend broken hearts and minds, to give justice to the oppressed. With perceptive musicality and stunning natural imagery, the poet offers the spirit of what her grandmother sought when she ventured into the East Tennessee woods to find medicinal plants to heal her family—poems that carry an imaginative ethnobotanical essence as they distill curative words in this time of climate change and escalating violence. Uniting the natural and the divine, and connecting the hills of Appalachia with the planetary landscape, Dodson’s mystical verses exemplify the wisdom of a poet with a love of place, illuminating the deep connection to the land that underlies the desire to love it, to protect it, and to listen to its stories.
Trailing the Azimuth
Trailing the Azimuth guides the readers down various trails through striking imagery, resonant language, and intensity of vision. Linked by allusions to the “azimuth,” the poems in this collection represent the search for direction in a world that is complex and uncertain, prompting the journey toward light and more mindfulness of self, others, and God. These lyrical compasses exhibit a multiplicity of style and subject informed by the poet’s travels, interest in hiking, and cultural awareness. Her multifaceted handicraft draws energy and empathy from everything in her background. Taking us along on walks within her own native landscape and around the world, Danita Dodson gives us verses about the ancestral identities of an Appalachian homeplace, meditations upon places like the Southwest that unfold Native American storytelling, celebrations of global journeys that rejoice both diversity and oneness, psalms that uplift the divine presence in nature, and poems that reveal healing pathways through COVID-19 by elevating memory, hope, and rebirth. Illuminated by Dodson’s unique voice as both a mountain woman and a citizen of the world, Trailing the Azimuth bridges physical and spiritual landscapes, offering readers a word-map as they traverse their own paths of life.
Sample Poems from
Trailing the Azimuth
From the mountainous landscape of Appalachia to the jungles of Jamaica and the streets of Nicaragua and Turkey, Danita Dodson’s range of style and subject reveals a poet who writes with the keen understanding of the beauty that can found anywhere and everywhere.
Clinch River Song
A poem about the sing-song river of my homeplace
Dwelling in Cliffs
A poem about the stones of memory that we all live behind