Love, loss, myth and Celtic lore (inverted): the Irish poet readers fell for in The Amie Series, collected for the first time

D Dodds Berry has lived inside readers' imaginations for over a decade as the Irish poet who first appeared in THE AMIE SERIES, teaching grad students at ASU and writing the kind of poems strangers carry in their pockets.

D is an American Book Award winning poet from County Mayo, Ireland. He teaches graduate poetry seminars at Arizona State University, calls the people he loves "Luv," and fines his students for using "literary high fructose corn syrup" in their writing. He is, as one character in his world observes, an ambush of exquisite imperfections.

He's also fictional. And these are his poems.

The Ruby Dares Me gathers verse spanning the full arc of D's interior life: longing drafted on bar napkins, the artistic transmutation of every dark ache buried in his origin, a father's declarations at the births his children, an elegy for a brother, and the masterful "Forgetting" - a love poem about choosing to live inside a lie because the mystery calls him home.

D is Eire embodied. He is Ireland before Patrick colonized it, the lore-keeper's Ireland, fierce and prelinguistic, requiring digging under stones to find. He's the man who ate the pomegranate whole, then plucked another. Who refused the doom his origin story was designed to produce.

The threshold poem, "An Underworld I Wanted," opens The Amie Series omnibus by Laurie Perez. The Chapbook draws from pieces woven through in all three novels: THE LOOK OF AMIE MARTINE (2016), THE POWER OF AMIE MARTINE (2018), and THE COSMOS OF AMIE MARTINE (2021) - presented as a distinct collection for the first time.

"Like your pulse, the ruby dares / me daily to remember: we are / for each other alive / and alive for each other." -D Dodds Berry