About
Dale Going is the author of the poetry collections THE BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE OF OUR DISASTER (Codhill Press, forthcoming June 2025), THE VIEW THEY ARRANGE (Kelsey St. Press) and AS/OF THE WHOLE; the chapbooks FOR THE ANNIVERSARIES OF ALL LOVING KINDS OF MEETINGS (Albion Books) and LEAVES FROM A GRADUAL (Potes & Poets); and the letterpress artist’s books AERIAL PERCEPTION, SHE PUSHES WITH HER HANDS, and OR LESS (Em Press). Her poetry has received recognition as an Ottoline Prize Finalist (Fence Books), San Francisco State Chapbook Award winner, and nominee for the Poets’ Prize. She has received grants from the Fund for Poetry and California Arts Council, and residency fellowships at Yaddo, Watermill Center, Wedding Cake House, and Djerassi. A letterpress printer and book artist, her award-winning Em Press editions of poetry by women are archived internationally in library special collections. She co-founded the quarterly ROOMS, which for a decade published formally innovative work by women writers and artists. She lives in Manhattan after a previous lifetime in Northern California.
Featured Work
THE BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE OF OUR DISASTER
In THE BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE OF OUR DISASTER, poet Dale Going, an early survivor of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, reflects with lyric grace and formal innovation on the reverberating trauma and long-term effects of illness, while connecting her rare cancer experience to the broader experience of the catastrophic world we're all living in now. The poet’s decades-long experience as a professional patient, which radically altered her life, interrupted her career, and is a constant of daily existence, is addressed in poems resonating with the felt sensations of an afflicted body, while celebrating with exuberant life force the pleasures available—‘the body’s too small to live in’—in an embracing stance toward love, art, and the natural world. Going gathers up fragments, takes the tears and tears (weeping/rips), the world's grief and error, and makes intimate wholes from the broken, as part of a poetic experiment in healing for ourselves, our others, our wounded world, in the only now.
Other Works
Awards and Recognition
- 2024 Ottoline Prize Finalist, Fence Books
- 2025 Watermill Center Residency Fellowship
- 2025 Wedding Cake House Residency
