The Bay, poetry by David Dodd Lee
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
Paperback, 102 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-09-3
David Dodd Lee’s new poetry collection The Bay is a “a hymn made out of spider webs.” Lee creates a pulsing lyrical narrative of our nature, a fragile but enduring ecosystem—animal, bird, fish, and human. “Personally” writes Lee, “I’m happy to live beside fish, inside this day that is divided/by birds.” Lee sees life and death through a lens known only to those who wholly appreciate the wild and what it offers. He writes with admiration. He writes with awe. He writes with knowing. Perhaps most importantly, he writes with connection. Nature and Humanity, he seems to express, are inextricable. We are part of the wild from which we so desperately try to separate ourselves. “I have a maple leaf inside this bible,” he writes. “One autumn it turned yellow and it is still yellow/and flat and delicate as a piece of paper with a love letter written on it.” We save what we can. We record what we can. While disappearance is inevitable, reading The Bay is like listening to a heartbeat for a while, our life’s rhythm. “The heart is just/a muscle,” Lee says. “Please Let’s watch the end together.”
Praise for David Dodd Lee & The Bay
David Dodd Lee’s The Bay is a book that wrestles with life in 21st Century America. The poems explore the events of our times—pandemic, political strife, climate change, and general tumult— with language that is intelligent, wry, specific and often aching in its beauty. These poems remind us that careful observation is a form of love. The world with its geese and foxes and even ticks, with beloved pets and humans we love and struggle with, deserves our full attention. So often we are turned to our devices, our internal landscape, and The Bay asks us to look outward, to see and find a way out of our habits of distance and dislike into a consideration of what to make of our world and our time on it. This is a bracing, often funny, and exquisite book.
—Cullen Bailey Burns, author of Slip
I know of no living poet more at home in the multitudes of themselves and their world than David Dodd Lee. The company of his poetry is like the company of the most genuine people and of nature itself—immediately and recognizably singular, yet infinitely, wondrously varied. Plainspoken, rhapsodic, familiar, hymnal, distracted, disjointed, centered, meditative, broken, healed, sentimental, sober, lost, wise . . . Lee’s new book, The Bay, reminds us that we too are infinitely complex, and that each of us can be worthy company to ourselves if we listen to all that we and our worlds are trying to say.
—Jonathan Johnson, author of May Is an Island
About the Author
David Dodd Lee is the author of thirteen poetry books, including the forthcoming chapbook Dead Zones, the Dictionary Sonnets (2025) as well as a full-length volume of persona poems, The 574 Calling Area Has Been Hit by the Blast (2026). He’s also the author of Downsides of Fish Culture, Abrupt Rural (1997, 2004, both from New Issues), Arrow Pointing North, The Nervous Filaments, and Animalities (2002, 2010, 2014, all from Four Way Books), Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), and two volumes of Ashbery erasure poems. His prose and poetry have been published in Southeast Review, New Ohio Review, Ocean State Review, Pleiades, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Guesthouse, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, River Styx, The Nation, Hunger Mountain, Tampa Review and Willow Springs. Lee is also a painter, collage artist, and a photographer. Since 2014 he has been featured in three one-person exhibitions, mixing collage and poetry texts into single improvisational artworks. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Lily Poetry Review, Off the Coast, The Hunger, The Rumpus, and Watershed Review. His collage work, accompanied by an interview, appeared in a recent issue of The Journal. In 2016 he began making sculptures, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. He teaches at Indiana University South Bend, where he is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, as well as the online literary journal The Glacier.
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
Paperback, 102 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-09-3
David Dodd Lee’s new poetry collection The Bay is a “a hymn made out of spider webs.” Lee creates a pulsing lyrical narrative of our nature, a fragile but enduring ecosystem—animal, bird, fish, and human. “Personally” writes Lee, “I’m happy to live beside fish, inside this day that is divided/by birds.” Lee sees life and death through a lens known only to those who wholly appreciate the wild and what it offers. He writes with admiration. He writes with awe. He writes with knowing. Perhaps most importantly, he writes with connection. Nature and Humanity, he seems to express, are inextricable. We are part of the wild from which we so desperately try to separate ourselves. “I have a maple leaf inside this bible,” he writes. “One autumn it turned yellow and it is still yellow/and flat and delicate as a piece of paper with a love letter written on it.” We save what we can. We record what we can. While disappearance is inevitable, reading The Bay is like listening to a heartbeat for a while, our life’s rhythm. “The heart is just/a muscle,” Lee says. “Please Let’s watch the end together.”
Praise for David Dodd Lee & The Bay
David Dodd Lee’s The Bay is a book that wrestles with life in 21st Century America. The poems explore the events of our times—pandemic, political strife, climate change, and general tumult— with language that is intelligent, wry, specific and often aching in its beauty. These poems remind us that careful observation is a form of love. The world with its geese and foxes and even ticks, with beloved pets and humans we love and struggle with, deserves our full attention. So often we are turned to our devices, our internal landscape, and The Bay asks us to look outward, to see and find a way out of our habits of distance and dislike into a consideration of what to make of our world and our time on it. This is a bracing, often funny, and exquisite book.
—Cullen Bailey Burns, author of Slip
I know of no living poet more at home in the multitudes of themselves and their world than David Dodd Lee. The company of his poetry is like the company of the most genuine people and of nature itself—immediately and recognizably singular, yet infinitely, wondrously varied. Plainspoken, rhapsodic, familiar, hymnal, distracted, disjointed, centered, meditative, broken, healed, sentimental, sober, lost, wise . . . Lee’s new book, The Bay, reminds us that we too are infinitely complex, and that each of us can be worthy company to ourselves if we listen to all that we and our worlds are trying to say.
—Jonathan Johnson, author of May Is an Island
About the Author
David Dodd Lee is the author of thirteen poetry books, including the forthcoming chapbook Dead Zones, the Dictionary Sonnets (2025) as well as a full-length volume of persona poems, The 574 Calling Area Has Been Hit by the Blast (2026). He’s also the author of Downsides of Fish Culture, Abrupt Rural (1997, 2004, both from New Issues), Arrow Pointing North, The Nervous Filaments, and Animalities (2002, 2010, 2014, all from Four Way Books), Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), and two volumes of Ashbery erasure poems. His prose and poetry have been published in Southeast Review, New Ohio Review, Ocean State Review, Pleiades, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Guesthouse, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, River Styx, The Nation, Hunger Mountain, Tampa Review and Willow Springs. Lee is also a painter, collage artist, and a photographer. Since 2014 he has been featured in three one-person exhibitions, mixing collage and poetry texts into single improvisational artworks. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Lily Poetry Review, Off the Coast, The Hunger, The Rumpus, and Watershed Review. His collage work, accompanied by an interview, appeared in a recent issue of The Journal. In 2016 he began making sculptures, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. He teaches at Indiana University South Bend, where he is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, as well as the online literary journal The Glacier.
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
Paperback, 102 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-09-3
David Dodd Lee’s new poetry collection The Bay is a “a hymn made out of spider webs.” Lee creates a pulsing lyrical narrative of our nature, a fragile but enduring ecosystem—animal, bird, fish, and human. “Personally” writes Lee, “I’m happy to live beside fish, inside this day that is divided/by birds.” Lee sees life and death through a lens known only to those who wholly appreciate the wild and what it offers. He writes with admiration. He writes with awe. He writes with knowing. Perhaps most importantly, he writes with connection. Nature and Humanity, he seems to express, are inextricable. We are part of the wild from which we so desperately try to separate ourselves. “I have a maple leaf inside this bible,” he writes. “One autumn it turned yellow and it is still yellow/and flat and delicate as a piece of paper with a love letter written on it.” We save what we can. We record what we can. While disappearance is inevitable, reading The Bay is like listening to a heartbeat for a while, our life’s rhythm. “The heart is just/a muscle,” Lee says. “Please Let’s watch the end together.”
Praise for David Dodd Lee & The Bay
David Dodd Lee’s The Bay is a book that wrestles with life in 21st Century America. The poems explore the events of our times—pandemic, political strife, climate change, and general tumult— with language that is intelligent, wry, specific and often aching in its beauty. These poems remind us that careful observation is a form of love. The world with its geese and foxes and even ticks, with beloved pets and humans we love and struggle with, deserves our full attention. So often we are turned to our devices, our internal landscape, and The Bay asks us to look outward, to see and find a way out of our habits of distance and dislike into a consideration of what to make of our world and our time on it. This is a bracing, often funny, and exquisite book.
—Cullen Bailey Burns, author of Slip
I know of no living poet more at home in the multitudes of themselves and their world than David Dodd Lee. The company of his poetry is like the company of the most genuine people and of nature itself—immediately and recognizably singular, yet infinitely, wondrously varied. Plainspoken, rhapsodic, familiar, hymnal, distracted, disjointed, centered, meditative, broken, healed, sentimental, sober, lost, wise . . . Lee’s new book, The Bay, reminds us that we too are infinitely complex, and that each of us can be worthy company to ourselves if we listen to all that we and our worlds are trying to say.
—Jonathan Johnson, author of May Is an Island
About the Author
David Dodd Lee is the author of thirteen poetry books, including the forthcoming chapbook Dead Zones, the Dictionary Sonnets (2025) as well as a full-length volume of persona poems, The 574 Calling Area Has Been Hit by the Blast (2026). He’s also the author of Downsides of Fish Culture, Abrupt Rural (1997, 2004, both from New Issues), Arrow Pointing North, The Nervous Filaments, and Animalities (2002, 2010, 2014, all from Four Way Books), Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), and two volumes of Ashbery erasure poems. His prose and poetry have been published in Southeast Review, New Ohio Review, Ocean State Review, Pleiades, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Guesthouse, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, River Styx, The Nation, Hunger Mountain, Tampa Review and Willow Springs. Lee is also a painter, collage artist, and a photographer. Since 2014 he has been featured in three one-person exhibitions, mixing collage and poetry texts into single improvisational artworks. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Lily Poetry Review, Off the Coast, The Hunger, The Rumpus, and Watershed Review. His collage work, accompanied by an interview, appeared in a recent issue of The Journal. In 2016 he began making sculptures, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. He teaches at Indiana University South Bend, where he is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, as well as the online literary journal The Glacier.