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On Third Person
David Dodd Lee has done it again! Lee’s Third Person tours the gap between official language — dictionary definitions, news headlines, media speak — and the absurd, terrible, funny experience of living American life. It’s a varied and unified collection. It’s outward-looking and self-aware. Absolutely, yes, I love this book.
—John Gallaher, author of My Life in Brutalist Architecture
David Dodd Lee's newest full-length collection, Third Person, is a practice in eclectic poetics. Although varied in style and forever fluctuating in form, all of these poems contain the same curious voice. Someone who has been at it for decades, reinventing himself and expanding upon his body of work with every new entry into his bibliography. Whether he's sifting through the dictionary or erasing Ashbery poems, Lee is finding inspiration everywhere he looks. Motivation to approach the blank page and "think / like an ox's / neck." His newest book is full of mole crickets and monarchs, bedbugs and fleas, bees and flies, digger wasps and dragonflies. If you listen closely, you can hear the fluttering, you can feel the crawling. Anything can happen within the confines of Third Person, because in Lee's world, dinner is served on a pool table.
—Benjamin Niespodziany, author of No Farther Than the End of the Street
John Ashbery on David Dodd Lee’s Ashbery erasure poems
In a note that accompanies And Others, Vaguer Presences, the most recent collection of erasures by David Dodd Lee, he uses the phrase, “the poem wanting what the poem wants.” This statement curiously corroborates my impression that these poems were actually written by the poems themselves, which had definite ideas about what they wanted and didn’t want. It’s a strange feeling, being twice removed from one’s poems, strange and refreshing. I highly recommend Lee’s version of the poems’ poems.
David Dodd Lee is the author of fourteen poetry books, including The Bay (Broadstone Books, 2025), The Dead Zones, The Dictionary Sonnets (Wolfson Press, 2026), and two forthcoming titles, The 574 Calling Area Has Been Hit by the Blast (Willow Springs Books, 2027) and The Wind Tunnel (2027), winner of The Editor’s Prize at Wandering Aengus Press in 2026. He has also authored two volumes of Ashbery erasure poems, both published by BlazeVOX Books. Poems and fiction have appeared in Salt Hill, Southeast Review, The Nation, Tampa Review, New Ohio Review, Ocean State Review, Willow Springs, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Best Small Fictions of 2020, River Styx, Guesthouse, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He teaches at Indiana University South Bend, where he is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press, as well as Co-Editor of the online literary journal The Glacier.
