If You Would Let Me uses the myth of Persephone and Demeter to explore, in an utterly contemporary idiom, the hellish descents and unequivocal love of a mother and an adolescent child. The old story is reimagined in new terms—a present-day Persephone’s cycles of psychic affliction giving rise to botched facial piercings, social media ghostings, and squalls of physical fury—and revoiced in poems that sing Demeter’s rage, the depths of maternal grief, the seasons of erasure and renewal. In an electric transposition of classic lore onto modern descriptive modes, Dietz casts the imperiling pubescence and anxiety of middle school as canonically significant and dangerously chimerical: “Persephone and her friends brought / Waxed paper cups of ice cream / To the meadow by the river,” where “Their laughter made ripples a heron / Mistook for alewives underwater” while “Under some of their shirts” grew “The first hiccups of puffy nipples.” Throughout these teenage transformations and the distances they grow, Dietz remains as constant as a lodestar, offering unwavering light for her child to see by in order to return. “You must know what I mean even if / You do not know you know: Child, // When you called my name I heard you / Though your cries could find no wind.”  Formally meticulous and sonically intricate, these poems hear as much as they make themselves heard, harnessing ancient energies to create a picture of our recycled world—a story for our own times, one not only familiar but perennially, timelessly true.  

Maggie Dietz was born and raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and educated at Northwestern University and Boston University. She is author of the poetry collections That Kind of Happy and Perennial Fall, which won New Hampshire’s Jane Kenyon Award. Dietz was the founding director of the Favorite Poem Project, created by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, and is co-editor of three anthologies related to the project. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Phillips Exeter Academy, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and Jentel Arts in Wyoming. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Adroit Journal, Bennington Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Salmagundi, The Threepenny Review and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and lives in New Hampshire with her family.