Angel T. Dionne, "Garden-Body"

 

Angel T. Dionne is a surrealist writer and professor at the University of Moncton’s Edmundston Campus. She obtained her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Pretoria in 2021. She is the author of Garden-Body (Radiant Press, forthcoming) and Bird Ornaments (Broken Tribe Press, 2025). She takes her coffee black and her fish tinned. Her website is here. 

About Garden-Body, by Angel T. Dionne

Lev’s Body grows only tangled weeds. His mother is part flora, part fauna; and his father is a bowl of ash. Through surrealist fragments of prose poetry, Garden-Body traces the invasive rhizomes of Lev’s life. 

Below, you can read two excerpts from the book. 

From Garden-Body

Birth

Lev is born without lips; a canvas of flesh stretches from cheek to cheek. A clean slate, his mother calls it, bird-pecking the place where his mouth should be. The doctors cut a thin line using a utility knife and expose rows of teeth already grown in, shimmering, adularescent moonstones. 

They slash him a bloodied smile and saddle-stitch the corners into an upturned crescent, so that even his cries look like laughter. 

A Collection of Eights

It’s worth mentioning now that Lev’s brother never really grew older than the age of eight. Benny slowly became his younger brother, then. He must have hatched from an eggplant, their mother says, whenever Benny spills his drink, or gets off his leash and bites a pedestrian, or births a small animal in the bathroom. She spikes her stinging-nettle tongue against him but always scoops the stillbirth from the toilet with her hands, pickles it, and writes Benny’s age on the jar in red marker. The naked deadborn rest in their salted brine, curling into themselves; swollen and decayed.

Every shelf in the house is crowded with dead things, all of them labeled with the number eight. 

Angel T. Dionne, "Bird Ornaments"

 

Angel T. Dionne is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Moncton Edmundston campus. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Pretoria and is the founding editor of Vroom Lit Magazine. She is the author of a full-length collection of short fiction, Sardines (ClarionLit, 2023), and two chapbooks, Inanimate Objects (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and Mormyridae (LJMcD Communications, 2024). She is also the co-editor of Rape Culture 101: Programming Change (Demeter Press, 2020). Her full-length poetry collection, Bird Ornaments, is forthcoming with Broken Tribe Press in early 2025.

About Bird Ornaments, by Angel T. Dionne
Bird Ornaments is a seventy-five-page collection of short surrealist poems focusing on the irrational juxtaposition of unrelated elements. In these poems, words and images eschew rationality and coherence, allowing thoughts to move freely without censorship. Bird Ornaments uncovers the true function of thought and unearths the marvellous, which is often obscured by the rational mind. As André Breton said, surrealism is the "undirected play of thought," and that’s what Bird Ornaments captures.

In "Grandmother’s Geraniums," flowers bloom from a rocking chair, from an egg, and from a toe infected with gout. "City Living" paints an unsettling portrait of urbanity with its tethered birds and hopeless beggars, while "Bastard Equations" examines the sum of a mother’s regrets. All in all, Bird Ornaments is a haunting look at what it means to be human.

The publisher's website is here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Bird Ornaments

Broken Silk

Which way did my neck bend 
           before it broke?
Did it grow crooked 
           with the weight of my silk?
Did it spin hot and gurgling 
          down my spine? 

I suck plump aphids
          from the audience’s crescendo.
In the open space, I evaporate,
          hanging there like a mosaic.

 
Borges Story

The roof leaks abandoned suspicions, 
and torn wood fragments
are lodged in the sunrise, 
paralyzing tomorrow’s breath.

 
My feet disintegrate 
into the daggered floors,
a signal 
for the jaded. 

A bear’s den of question marks 
and explanations 
is scrawled 
on the soles of my feet.

My legs have always been a Borges story – 
a garden of forking paths,
a book of sand, 
a library of babble,
burbling commitments. 

Angel Dionne, "Sardines"

 

Angel T. Dionne is an Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Moncton Edmundston campus. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Pretoria, and she is the founder/head editor of Vroom Lit Magazine. Her writing has been featured in several journals and anthologies. She is the author of a full-length collection of short fiction, Sardines (ClarionLit, 2023) and two chapbooks, Inanimate Objects (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and Mormyridae (LJMcD Communications, forthcoming). She also served as co-editor for Rape Culture 101: Programming Change (Demeter Press, 2020). She currently lives in Canada with her wife and cats. 

About Sardines
It is a universal enough truth that human beings are social by nature. There is space within us which normally fills up with relationships and rich experiences. When we are rendered solitary by circumstance or temperament, however, that space fills instead with the symptoms of loneliness. Angel Dionne’s dry, observant short stories pull back the lid of that claustrophobic way of life, giving us a vantage on the minor existential pains of people talking most often to themselves.

In this, the author’s first collection, readers will find twelve tinned tales of a world both familiar and disquietingly austere. For all of her economy of expression, Dionne’s investigations into the scenes - hair salon, butcher’s, library, zoo, café - and occurrences - a read-through of the paper, a conversation at the cash-out, an inquiry into the open job - of everyday life are meticulously observed.

Dionne’s story-telling is a kind of narrative atomic theory, in the same philosophical school as the writing of Nancy Huston, Édouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, Thomas Bernhard, I. L. Peretz. Life, Dionne shows, is not so abstract or so complex that it cannot be made sense of. With sympathy, wit, and a relentless eye for detail, she demonstrates how to discern the commonplace minutiae of human existence, and how to see the ways they interact and compound until the mundane begins to resonate with human meaning.

You can read more about Sardines on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories in the collection. 

From Sardines, by Angel Dionne

Sardines (excerpt)

Antoine had always marveled at the way the concrete walls and darkened windows of city buildings were transformed at night. By day, they stood benign, but at night they rose and became towering giants looming high over narrow streets. The tenement buildings and brick storefronts, in crowded desperation, attempted to blot out the moon, and the city sank into a tepid darkness from which Antoine wasn’t certain it would ever rise.

Antoine had been born in this city, had grown up in this city, had toiled and agonized and would, as far as he was concerned, die in this city. At sixty-two years of age, he awaited death like one awaits a long-departed lover. He occupied a little ground-floor apartment in a tenement building, facing neither the sunlight by day or the damp luminescence of moonlight by evening — the perfect place for a forgotten pensioner burdened with arthritis and a stubborn cough.

Although thin-walled, the apartment was good enough to suit him. It wasn’t quite home. In fact, the city never really had been despite the fact that he’d never left it. The oppressive air and colourless pavement made up the sum total of his life. Sometimes, he wished things had been different for him ...