D.W. Baker
LightNews LightNews
banner
lowermelody.bsky.social
D.W. Baker
@lowermelody.bsky.social
860 followers 1.1K following 410 posts
submerging poet, dad, editor ~ place, bodies, belonging, the end of the world ~ edits for @LibreLit.bsky.social reads for @VariantLit.bsky.social @PhillyChapbook.bsky.social @CosmicDaffodil.bsky.social ~ he/him ~
🪐💀🏳️‍🌈🍃 https://www.dwbakerpoetry.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
lowermelody.bsky.social
New review in the Encounters issue of @panoramajournal.bsky.social:

"Soundscape, Landscape, Ghost: on FIREFALL by Heather Lang-Cassera" (2025: @unsolicitedpress.bsky.social)

a full-length that explores the limits of the individual subject, the landscape, and the sonic properties of language
The cover of FIREFALL: poems by Heather Lang-Cassera, featuring a black and white illustration of a woman's head and neck merging with the outline of a tree, against a red background
November 30, 2025 at 8:02 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
from my review of OUR HUMAN SHORES by @burrowtongue.bsky.social (2025, @blackoceanbooks.bsky.social)
methodical sounds our body chooses to silence— its fantastical streamlining of order, this chaos we have sown. Stimuli drowning us always (77) This understanding accords with scientific knowledge about information processing such as the Shannon limit, similar to the idea of bandwidth. In terms of the body, it follows that the total available sensory input of reality is compressed and altered—replaced with a biased image—by the biological processing limits of the human nervous system. By consistently emphasizing embodiment’s role in lived experience, Fomon orients readers towards a shared sense of humanity as a distributed physical presence, intertwined with our surroundings at multiple scales: cells and molecules; particles and waves; food webs and capital markets.
November 30, 2025 at 5:00 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
another cento pantoum, this one based on Velvet Underground lyrics
Eye Sickness cento pantoum, after the collected lyrics of Lou Reed & The Velvet Underground Simple mass reverse, while the real thing is dying— when you think the night has seen your mind— some kinds of love are mistaken for their vision (jumpsuit and pig meat and making his fortune). When you think the night has seen your mind, skewer the sieve of optical sewer! Jumpsuit, and pig meat, and making his fortune, Oh, all the trees are calling after you. Skewer the sieve of optical sewer, washing the eye of the land that has been. Oh, all the trees are calling after you: I know where the mirror’s edge is inside of your heart. Washing the eye of the land that has been white light. White light moved in me, through my brain— I know where—the mirror’s edge is inside. Your heart set the casket flaming; do not go gentle, blazing white light—white light moved in me—through my brain, some kinds of love are mistaken for their vision. Set the casket flaming—Do not go gentle, blazing simple mass—reverse, while the real thing is dying—
November 30, 2025 at 1:37 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
Currently reading/reviewing: LILACS by Rainer Diana Hamilton, an experimental collection of lilacs or "trance essays" engaging with sensory experience and embodied memory

www.krupskayabooks.com/catalog/p/ra...
The cover of Lilacs by Rainer Diana Hamilton
November 5, 2025 at 11:11 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
from THE UNWORTHY by Agustina Bazterrica, reviewed by Savannah Brooks in @forkapplepress.bsky.social

forkapplepress.com/thejuice/the...
I found a box of mobile phones that were turned off. My mother had told me about them, from when there was internet, she’d said. When the world still believed the internet was going to last forever. Now the phones are worthless. Black screens and silence. That’s what Mom had said, black screens and silence, and she’d showed me her useless mobile, told me what the world had been like before, how people had done everything on those screens, how they believed that in some countries the electricity had been cut because of artificial intelligence, to prevent its advance, the spread of its power, its independence and hunger to dominate its creator. How after the final blackout the world did not recover, rebuild, restart, because nature finished things off with a new degree of devastation.
November 1, 2025 at 2:57 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
finally placed a long form review of APOCALYPSE DANCE (Wipf & Stock: 2025) by Ethan McGuire! Coming soon to Radix Magazine
the cover of APOCALYPSE DANCE by Ethan McGuire, featuring a black-and-white line drawing of a skeleton and several human soldiers fighting on horseback
October 27, 2025 at 8:54 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
excerpt from "Birding Through the Aftermath" by Katelyn Sweeney
What taxonomy of grief includes this? That brown flutter between dead branches finch? Maybe he says some part of me listening despite myself
October 25, 2025 at 1:08 AM
lowermelody.bsky.social
Mail day! it's the new @evaalterpoet.bsky.social from Eulogy Press
The cover of AUTOCARTOGRAPHIES by Eva Alter
October 19, 2025 at 7:26 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
www.sciencealert.com/misophonia-l...
These findings highlight just how complex our experiences with sound can be. Hearing really is much more than just the ear doing its job. More severe misophonia may be linked to less mental flexibility around emotional situations and a stronger habit of negative thinking.
October 17, 2025 at 12:23 AM
lowermelody.bsky.social
huge thanks to @genrepunkmag.bsky.social for nominating this poem, "air," co-authored with @gr8earlofhell.bsky.social as part of a series, for the Pushcart prize. 🌬

genrepunkmag.wordpress.com/2025/08/20/a...
air after midnight now & i am instituting the freight train over lombard street shut the fuck up challenge & it's not an attack on trains but actually in defense of a silent night, soundtracked only by tires across slick pavement & an errant thrush. it's been months since i heard a whistle sound through the stark chill of midnight air & i swear this tree had leaves the last time i looked but here we are now, in the waxing-days of january staring at pockets of orangegrey between shadows of branches. i will always bemoan july's humid advances but never stop to consider the right now of it all—the way chills lurch up unsuspecting spine, regardless of the weight of my jacket. the black-iced patches of uneven brick sidewalk. the way a sound, any sound, cuts the sky in the first hours of a new year, ecstatic at all the streets it may roam unencumbered. i keep a stock of blades to cut the sky beneath my tongue / shaped like every sound that was rejected by my kin
October 10, 2025 at 9:43 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
New prose / poetry combo out in the Autumn 2025 issue of @version9magazine.bsky.social! An essay-in-halves, "Sonic Pressure and The Lexical Poem," plus a suite of four microsonnets, including this previously unpublished one, "microsonnet of climate crisis terms"

version9magazine.com
Microsonnet of climate crisis terms climate feedback aerosols atmospheric glacier loss climate forcing entropy carbon footprint refugees dryland farming hydrologic aquifer hydrocarbon biogenic hydrosphere
September 29, 2025 at 10:47 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
futurism.com/future-socie...
A recent preliminary survey of AI-related psychiatric impacts by social work researcher Keith Robert Head points to a coming society-wide crisis brought on by “unprecedented mental health challenges that mental health professionals are ill-equipped to address.” “We are witnessing the emergence of an entirely new frontier of mental health crises as AI chatbot interactions begin producing increasingly documented cases of suicide, self-harm, and severe psychological deterioration that were previously unprecedented in the internet age,” Head writes.
September 27, 2025 at 1:28 AM
lowermelody.bsky.social
I'm honored to have this collage, "Matrilineal," published by @turningleafjournal.bsky.social and brilliantly paired with a poem titled "SELFISH GIRL" by Suze Kay, nominated for Best of the Net. So is the poem! See more at turningleafjournal.com/2025/06/01/s...
a collage using photorealistic elements to depict a child with flowers for a head, walking towards an adult female figure with a lightbulb for a head, in an environment with both natural (colores) and built (black & white) elements
September 25, 2025 at 7:30 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
Bertolt Brecht:
Motto In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing about the dark times.
September 19, 2025 at 2:06 AM
lowermelody.bsky.social
Tonight! I will be reading poems about mental health to celebrate the release of @tommywyattblake.bsky.social's MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION from @the-ethelzine.bsky.social
discord voice reading D.W. Baker & tommy wyatt blake September 12th / 8pm (est) DM for the link
September 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
from "Atonal Apocalypse: On MILK SICKNESS by David Greenspan" (@querenciapress.bsky.social: 2025), in which I compare experimental prose to atonal music

published in @brokenantlermag.bsky.social's The Marrow earlier this year
Greenspan’s use of indeterminacy in language may be best understood via analogy to tonal harmony. The vast majority of music is tonal, using recognizable contours and relationships—including, in the western tradition, a whole nomenclature of terms such as “root,” “dominant,” “key signature,” and more—to create desired effects such as tension, progression, recognition, and resolution. Atonal music is carefully structured to avoid these determinate relationships, instead producing a musical text that is coherent, yet dissonant; eventful, yet without resolution; all the while carefully calibrated, yet apparently chaotic. In literature, if normative devices such as character, plot, and genre are like the shared language of tonal harmony, then Milk Sickness is the atonal exception. The book’s language operates with a concerted effort to avoid typical ordering mechanisms: there are multiple unnamed figures, but no lucid characters; many impactful events and chains of cause-and-effect, but no clearly defined linear plot; countless synchronicities, but no framework for understanding their logic.
September 9, 2025 at 9:57 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
from my lyric essay, "Sense Tools"

www.ballastjournal.com/dialogue-duf...
In poetry, I believe this means the power of sound is not only lyrical, but cognitive: activating connective pathways in the brain that mere images do not. This unity between connective form and connective content in Duffey’s “Wilderness” prompts me to consider: Does the natural world contain rhyme? How can we learn to listen, and to sound in harmony with it? What socially constructed dissonances inhibit the way? Can rhyme in language be a tool for priming the brain to access rhyme in life?
September 5, 2025 at 4:17 AM
lowermelody.bsky.social
this maps perfectly onto my understanding of sound in language. My work as a reading interventionist & musician has led me to believe that sonic processing unlocks specific modes of cognitive integration.

My lyric essay "Sense Tools" touches on this

www.psypost.org/simple-rhyth...
Even a basic auditory rhythm can reconfigure how the brain organizes itself, according to a new study published in Advanced Science. The researchers introduced a new analytical tool called FREQ-NESS, which maps how brain networks operate simultaneously across different frequencies. The results suggest that hearing rhythmic tones engages the auditory cortex while also reorganizing the brain’s broader network configuration, shifting dominant oscillations and enhancing communication between slower and faster brain rhythms.
September 5, 2025 at 4:12 AM
lowermelody.bsky.social
got a new badge reel clip for work
a small badge with text, "the horrors persist but so do I," surrounding a raccoon sitting on a mushroom surrounded by flowers under the moon and stars
August 30, 2025 at 7:30 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
from my long sectional poem, "Anthropocene Clock Face," published in 2023

www.softstarmagazine.com/p/anthropoce...
Second Hour Let me claim replenishment through fire: I walk above the damned for I was one who planted the olive trees -
August 24, 2025 at 1:26 AM
lowermelody.bsky.social
I'm excited to be supporting the release of @tommywyattblake.bsky.social 's MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION at this reading in a few weeks! I'll be reading poems on mental health, institutionalization, and intra-self experience
discord voice reading D.W. Baker & tommy wyatt blake September 12th 8pm (est) DM for the link
August 21, 2025 at 7:38 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
Currently reading / reviewing: OUR HUMAN SHORES by Josh Fomon from @blackoceanbooks.bsky.social, a fascinating hybrid book of prose, lineated verse, and in-between forms; my most sticky-noted book this year.
the cover of OUR HUMAN SHORES by Josh Fomon: a silhouette watches a tree burn in the dark.
August 12, 2025 at 2:56 AM
lowermelody.bsky.social
having started the day with a few bites of rhyme discourse (over on X), here is a rhyming poem of mine, a sonnet, "The Old Man and the Road," first published in Skyway Journal
The Old Man and the Road by D. W. Baker gaze into our sunset tracing past the maps vision cut with tunnels days elide contracts motion without timeframe carbon void of loss just another someday hope ignoring cost muscle car pornography before the rolling hearse climate rot despondency betrays our effort’s worth prayer hum adjacency to being love on earth
August 2, 2025 at 1:05 PM
lowermelody.bsky.social
from my review essay, "Multilingualism and Metaphor: on Desire/Halves by Jaia Hamid Bashir"

as my body of work accumulates, I find delightful common threads, gradually revealed

these sentences align with more recent work on the idea of recursion, or the limits of 4D embodiment
The religious connotations of “litany,” a word with roots in European antiquity, commingle with imagery of the many-limbed god, an iconographic style with roots in South Asia. The speaker later adds, “I want tallies for limbs. I want to be / a godstorm.” If divinity is the capacity for holding multiple desires at once—even conflicting ones—then humanity may be understood as the limitation of forced choices.
July 25, 2025 at 1:58 AM
lowermelody.bsky.social
throwback to "Ouroboros," a spark of free verse, first published in Hearth & Coffin's "Consume" issue

www.hearthandcoffin.com/post/poetry-...
The great snake of cycles suffers an affliction of leprosy. The tail of the past that used to melt so sweetly on the tongue now has grown tough plastic scales slicked by the unforgiving darkness of excavated oil.
July 18, 2025 at 2:27 PM