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Experimental visual and prose poems that reimagine Greco-Roman mythology through a feminist lens.
The poems in Whispering Gallery explore the tensions between analog and digital poetics, language, and materiality. Each poem, first typed on a typewriter and then digitally manipulated, is named for a female or feminine figure (wives, daughters, monsters, mothers, muses) stalled, subdued, or caught in moments of suspension rather than heroic resolution. Paired prose poems translate these mythic figures into contemporary, intimate registers, tracing the quiet violences, care, and survival that shape lived experience.
Drawing on personal and domestic ephemera (thread, spice, old print artifacts), the collection explores repetition, distortion, and persistence as formal and thematic tools. Equal parts intimate diary, scholarly engagement, and playful experimentation, Whispering Gallery offers myth as a site of shared vulnerability, radical care, and connection.
“Beautiful and hypnotic, subtle and shocking, Whispering Gallery is an instant classic. Dani Spinosa’s entrancing visual poems and vulnerable, insightful prose poetry will echo through you long after you read the last page.”—Helen Hajnoczky, author of Frost & Pollen
"An incredibly punk holler; all grief and anxiety and fury and exasperation, mind and body. Dani Spinosa ain’t keeping her voice down in this Whispering Gallery, she’s joined by a Greek chorus of semi-feral voices. Medea, Pasiphae, Cassandra, Hestia hold hands through the scary parts. Whispering Gallery is all pussy, all riot."—Derek Beaulieu, author of Do It Wrong: How to Be a Poet In the Twenty-First Century
“In the captivating space of her prose poems’ justified walls, Spinosa refigures the tragic heroines of Greek mythology. Her companion visual poems weave word and flesh in shades of black and red that recall a typewriter’s ribbon, bedecking and binding alike Glauke and Pasiphae, along with Alkmene, Thetis, and other foremothers. These poems do not hold captive, but rather encapsulate—offering protection while revealing the ways the gazes of gods and men disastrously hemmed them in. Nuanced and complex, the voices that whisper here resonate in new and profound ways, resisting any attempt to subsume their bodies by taking back their own tongues. This is a spellbinding book.”—Amaranth Borsuk, author of The Book
Dani Spinosa is a poet, scholar, educator, writer, and a computer programmer. She is an adjunct professor, a software developer, a digital and creative project manager, a co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press, president of Canthius, the managing editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, and the author of two books: OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020) and Anarchists in the Academy (U of Alberta Press, 2018). She lives in beautiful Wasaga Beach, Ontario.