“In the streaming pages of his Dead Salmon Dialectics, Derrick Denholm’s dramatic variations open into an entirely new kind of correlative clause, to a ‘core sampling’ of the living, breathing, north coast tangle of fish and names, mixed equally with the ongoing currents of rainforest and poetic fluvials he so adroitly weaves together. In page after page, Denholm writes of the ‘wings, limbs and mouths’ that pulse in these amazing ‘disintegrating remains,’ not just of salmon, but the all, bringing together the movement of consumption, the ‘long here’ of his ‘adult rain salmon rewrite,’ in this, his ‘running streamcourse’ of what goes on, and on.”

–Ken Belford

“His name is Derrick and naming is what Dead Salmon Dialectics does. Denholm takes a serious run at locating a ‘lan(d)guage’ that negotiates the particulars of place by naming. Thus these ‘phloems’ reach for a language that might help materialize a place-derived commons; minute, truthful, and particular. This poetry is a salvage operation that knifes in an ecologic lexicon, a dendrite map of a poetrophic system of attention. Hard work, but incisive and worth it–a dialect of place we need to remember.”

–Fred Wah