Projects

The Two Berlins (an experimental memoir in progress)

Two Berlins explores two very different trips to Berlin, many years apart. As the birthplace of my mother, who emigrated to the U.S. as a young child, Berlin has always been both a real and imagined place for me. This book documents two trips that I took to Berlin to discover the city for myself; The first as a young college student and another many years later to give a poetry reading. It draws on family stories, documentary evidence, cultural and social history of a divided and reunited Berlin. And weaves in imagined histories of long-abandoned apartments and objects to fill in the gaps in family stories. The book is very much also the journey of a poet into the unknown landscape of creative non-fiction.

“This Tiny House” (New book-length collection in-progress)

“This Tiny House” is a new collection of poems composed in and around New York City over the last few years during, and “post?”- pandemic. Excerpts have been published in Oversound, The Colorado Review, The Tiny, The Recluse (The Poetry Project), and Can we have our ball back?. Poems have also recently been performed at Bushwick book club New York City and London events.

The Block (Book-length work - investigative poetics)

Begun during a nine-month residency at the Lower-Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace residency, The Block is a book-length work of poems, lyric essays, found text, images and schematics that documents a series of geolocated walks in a hyper-local radius of my Manhattan, New York City neighborhood. Portions of the series have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, SplitLevel Journal and as a limited edition pamphlet at the LMCC open studios. This work was also presented as an artist talk / performance that was live-streamed internationally as part of Collecting Anxiety curated by Chiarina Chen.

Dear Body (Ugly Duckling Presse 2007, Digital Edition 2018)

“The salutation 'Dear,' Dear Someone, already anachronistic, along with the stamp and the signature. No one is now present to epistelatory intimacy. And yet, here is a book of poems: Dear Body:. As if the mind and its linguistic dream were unable to sever itself from an address, unable to become an anonymous slate. Dan Machlin upholds the singular clarities of speaking from one body to another. A body of knowledge, for example. A body of endurance. Brilliant, fierce, and spare, these poems bring us, line by line, into a new apprehension of what we are all too ready to rescind. 'Is it sufficient that the body at times/ can be thought to overwrite the purity of consciousness?' The answer is both personal and resonant: 'because I’m scared/about nothing being done.'
— Ann Lauterbach

6x7 (Ugly Duckling Presse 2005, Digital Edition apx. 2014)

Beautiful ugly duckling chapbook beautifully designed by Phil Cordelli. The poems in this series are all six lines long and seven syllables each. Available online as a digital edition.