Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance
by Todd Dillard
Variant Lit, 42pp., $11.00
Todd Dillard successfully transgresses the unspoken cultural embargo on work that grapples with life during the COVID-19 pandemic in his new chapbook. He employs lithe and resonant language along with carefully illustrated connections between lived experience and universal themes to adroitly straddle the line between documentary and intimacy. In doing so, he communicates not only the material upheaval of 2020, but also the acute impacts of that era on people’s inner lives.
Dillard isn’t coy about his theme, including the word “pandemic” in seven of the twenty-three poem titles of Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance (Variant Lit, 2024), including “Ars Pandemic,” “Pandemic Dream: The Book of Gone,” and “Pandemic Menagerie.” The rest form a complementary suite, foregrounding parenting and relationship themes against a backdrop of uncertainty and grief. Many of the poems allude to the specific time of composition. “Tiny houses corona the air,” Dillard writes in “I Let the Foxes Live,” and the title and premise of “Nostalgia for the Ways I Used to Fear Death” are strengthened by the virus’s presence, calling vivid pictures to mind with the simple words, “covid tests—positive—”
In “Pandemic Fairy Tale,” Dillard’s carefully selected details invite readers to inhabit both an external world, in which “the news announces flour shortages,” and a perceptive one, in which flowers, “breath-touched, bloom / into blue-pinched faces.” He employs “breadcrumb” as a verb to describe acts of persistence and invention,
in spite of there not being a path,
just a time that, once upon us,
is always upon us.
The poem’s speaker, like many in the book, operates at an uncertain temporal distance. Dillard exploits this perspective by weaving immediate detail with measured reflection. “My misunderstanding has turned / into my only way of understanding,” he asserts, offering readers an analytical framework that mirrors one of the defining features of the COVID-19 Pandemic; that is, its power to defamiliarize and interrogate social norms previously submerged in the public’s consciousness.
Dillard’s style is often direct and vivid, but he doesn’t shy away from the abstract and surreal; his techniques to defamiliarize quotidian detail — reminiscent of poet Charles Simic — are well-matched to the content. Perhaps the most striking example of this is a poem titled after an abstraction, “The Newness,” that is tightly composed around imagery of toilets. Dillard opens the poem with a realist’s declarative sentence, “Sometimes you have to get rid of a toilet.” From there, he guides readers using a mixture of imaginative detail (“Do you know how easy a toilet shatters / under one sledgehammer swing?”) and carefully-enjambed revelation (“it’s like / when you died and, after, I broke / your life apart”), all of which culminate in a changed way of seeing,
Now when I go for walks I wonder
where a toilet would fit in. I wonder,
if you were here, what new place
you would pick to abandon.
Dillard’s poetics serve to disorient readers, and experience contagious waves of grief and uncertainty, while they encounter valuable reminders that the process of reorientation opens a site of possibility, of invention—or, to borrow Dillard’s term, of Newness. A pair of statements evoking this orientation toward grief, a shared emotional terrain for much of the pandemic experience, are among the most vivid analogies in the book, with the poet observing in “The Sadness of Horses” that,
horses have a blind spot extending
about six feet in front of them,
the depth we bury our dead
is the length of what they cannot see—
One of the book’s central goals is finding ways to conceive of this blind spot. In “No Rush,” Dillard uses the language of dreams to render grief as domestic space:
Last night I dreamed
grief was an unlit room I had to clean.
Just as I figured out how to navigate its darkness
I put something away and had to learn all over.
A focus on vision, seeing the blind spot and navigating the darkness, characterizes both of these skillful renditions of inner life marked by tragedy. Just as grief helped push the world forward with fresh eyes in 2020, so does it propel Dillard’s speakers forward with changed perspectives. The contrast with children’s voices, often paraphrased, intensifies this sadness and darkness, offering alternate ways of seeing.
“One Hundred Thousand Bells” uses the child’s persona to interrogate received frameworks, contrasting “the cartoon girl that’s meant to represent her” with real questions like, “Where did my daughter learn what she buries / will always belong to her?” A similarly vivid scene in “Edna” of the father-daughter relationship offers a childlike perception. When the “TV says a crane collapsed off 34th and / she wants to know if it’s because the crane was thirsty,” assumed categories—animal and machine—are briefly scrambled. Later, the speaker observes that “she loves it most when I swim away as fast as I can, / when my back becomes a shore that she’s trying to reach.” This joyful innocence contrasts poignantly with Dillard’s own experience with a receding horizon, as in the deeply personal, “Lighthouse,” where he writes, “some nights / this feeling—-everything is rushing away. I’m going to die.”
In other hands, this book may have become merely a stylized collection of period-specific journal entries. However, Dillard’s lines of verse are careful and precise, aware of the inherent challenge in representing our collective experience with language filled with ambiguity. In “Pandemic (Good Advice),” the speaker—a father—says of his daughter, learning to swim,
I keep thinking I misunderstood, my daughter
didn’t mean perfect is what practice makes,
but that terror—it’s all around us, you can get used to it,
you just keep wading in.
Dillard’s language is richly layered, with literal description becoming metaphor and specific experience that arcs towards the universal. He displays his skill for lineation in poems like “How to Live,” where he writes,
Depravity begins with thinking of love
as a radical act. I quit loving
with difficulty. I love
easy now. Two parakeets on my shoulders.
These lines probe and don’t fear to name, perhaps because “silence is a type of touch, / which means a type of burial,” as the speaker of “View from Euridice’s Shoulder” asserts. Dillard’s commitment to speaking, to writing, to attempting to name an uncertain world even as it crumbles, is the engine which propels the book forward.
This chapbook does what any good group of poems ought to do: orbit a powerful thematic center of gravity. By tracing the surfaces presented to us by the poet, readers can approximate the mass and location of disease and loss underneath. Dillard’s insightful work guides toward greater awareness of that dark matter, leaving readers a breadcrumb trail they might follow as they, too, attempt to dance with the dead in their own lives.
About the Author
Todd Dillard grew up in Houston, Texas, completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Houston with a concentration in creative writing and poetry. From there, he moved to New York to study in the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, where he received his MFA in poetry in 2008.
After living for a few years in Brooklyn and the Bronx, Todd moved to Philadelphia with his wife to start a family. He’s now the father of a wonderful daughter, and works as a writer and editor for a teaching hospital.
Todd’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including Best New Poets, McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, Electric Literature, Nimrod, Superstition Review, and Split Lip Magazine. His work was selected as a finalist for the 2018 “Best Small Fictions” anthology, and has been nominated numerous times for the “Best of the Net” and the Pushcart anthologies. He is a recipient of the Birdwhistle Poetry Prize. His debut collection “Ways We Vanish” was released in 2020 from Okay Donkey Press.
Contributor Bio
D.W. Baker is a poet, editor, and teacher from Saint Petersburg, Florida. His poetry appears in Identity Theory, ballast, and Sundog Lit, among others, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. He reads for several mastheads including Variant Lit and Libre. See more of his work at www.dwbakerpoetry.com
Contents
Book Excerpt: Further Thought by Rae Armantrout
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2025, “Further Thought” from Go Figure by Rae Armantrout, along with a few words from the poet.
Read five poems by poet A.L. Nielsen, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “When We Walked”.
Chapbook Poem: The Poem as an Act of Betrayal by Benjamin S. Grossberg
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2025, “The Poem as an Act of Betrayal” from As Are Right Fit by Benjamin S. Grossberg, along with a few words from the poet.
Jan. ‘25: Year One: What worked, what didn’t, and what to expect
Editor Aiden Hunt looks back at our first year and discusses changes to Philly Poetry Chapbook Review in 2025.
Three Poems by Shelli Rottschafer
Read three poems by poet Shelli Rottschafer, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “Because We Remember.”
Dancing With the Dead: On Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance by Todd Dillard
“Todd Dillard successfully transgresses the unspoken cultural embargo on work that grapples with life during the COVID-19 pandemic in his new chapbook, Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance.”
Read three poems by poet Wendell Hawken, our third biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “First Hurt”.