TO TRACY LIKE / TO LIKE / LIKE began as an email chain of notes to the self. From one email address to the other, I noticed that I was devolving into an ars poetica. I was responding to the lines I was writing, as if I wasn't me. For the past year, I have used this opportunity to explore the idea that one has to be emotionally vulnerable while craving physical security. I am trying to answer the fear: "I don't want to be fragile / how can I be gentle?" The project will be published as a chapbook through Akinoga Press in 2018.

Ongoing performance with Amanda McCormick, DID YOU COVER UP? is a blend of Tracy Dimond's I WANT YOUR TAN and Amanda McCormick's & THE GREEN. With experimental poetry and erasure, Dimond and McCormick question the role of gendered bodies in a non-neutral world through their language and movements.

Publisher: Ink Press Productions
Letterpress printing by Amanda McCormick
Designed and spray-painted by Tracy Dimond

BLURBS:

Something burns your skin. This could be nature. This could be the sun. This could be where you are in someone else's eyes. Boys will be boys, right? That's natural? That's your nature? Tracy Dimond's I WANT YOUR TAN questions these points of ignition, the point at which the body meets the world. The point at which a woman becomes her skin, becomes her dress, becomes consumed. She is not here to "romanticize ruin." She wages "war on authenticity." And you should be screaming her battle cry. - Caroline Crew

“I am approaching an age / where getting it together / is a war on authenticity.” Yes, that age has arrived & we’re all living in it. Today I am coping by buying into Tracy Dimond’s I Want Your Tan. These poems say that a body’s contortions&costumes&contacts don’t make an identity, but how we feel about those contortions&costumes&contacts do. It takes one statement to start a spiral, but this body is bombarded by statements (covetous/creepy/encroaching statements), the spiral changes direction, starts again, gets every/body wanting. Oh wanting wanting wanting. There are different kinds. I want you//I want to touch you//I want to be you//I want to wear you//I want you to be different//I want you to know me, my spirals. I Want Your Tan holds you accountable for knowing the difference. Oh Tracy oh Tracy how’d you get that tan? If you want it you’ll have to sit on Tracy’s porch under her sun & in the library under her lamp & swim in her pool & go back to the 90s & ride her bike. But coveting tans is creepy, go get your own fucking tan. Tip: ABSORB THIS BOOK. WAKE UP GLOWING & SPIRALING. - Meg Ronan

In I Want Your Tan Tracy Dimond is every therapist I’ve never had. “A costume is no attachment to identity,” she writes, and “it’s all fun and games until it’s time to go outside.” Dimond is speaking to the right now. The day, each (every) one of them, which our bodies must enter into. Dimond conjures the tan then exfoliates ‘til bleeding. I think: Tan: what’s painted or airbrushed or laid down for, but also what we earn for stepping out into the light/the sun. In order to be seen we must be touched by it, we must be damaged. “Do you know how to talk about / femininity divorced from fuckability?” Well, do you. “Do you confuse gender and / performance?” She uses the ultimate ‘natural’ way to change our appearance, the tan, to speak to the larger issues of living inside a world that both condemns and demands the “exotic.” Are we allowed to live in the world while owning a female body. Who wins, what sells. “Advertisements are art if I am your hobby.” So many times I wanted to jump up and shout YES while reading, but I’m in public, dressed up, and trying to be unseen. We are not alone but so very alone. We are told to be silent beauties, do not make a scene. Dimond defies, builds this space of everything she fears and hates and is and says look at me, listen to me. She yells, “I’m working hard! / Man-hours under the sun.” Nothing is ours. I mean, even tans fade. - Alexis Pope

Sorry I Wrote So Many Sad Poems Today is a collection of poetry that explores the humor in dark thoughts. Winner of City Paper's Best Chapbook in 2013.

Design and letterpress printing by Amanda McCormick
Publisher: Ink Press Productions

"I write poems that are funny/to other people, but sad to me." After I finished SORRY I WROTE SO MANY SAD POEMS TODAY, I felt lucky that Tracy Dimond writes exactly what she does. Her vision of the world is full of whimsy and light and strangeness, but don't let Dimond fool you. Just when you're thinking that maybe you have this world all figured out, there is a tooth mark, a bruise, a sneak attack. Try "A study said cat litter causes suicide" or "You said smiling is for the weak/and showed me a picture of your dogs." What can you do with lines like that but love them? - Laura van den Berg

Split into four sections, this poetry collection considers a blank identity's attempt to find a sense of self in the modern world.

The poems take pop culture and inspect it’s seriousness. Through exposure, the exterior world becomes a part of identity.

Publisher: NAP
Design by Chad Redden

REVIEWS/BLURBS:
"There's a great balance of cultural critique and generous humor in Tracy's voice here: For instance, this stanza: "I want to sum up/the philosophy of Donald Trump/in less than three chords." A book worth returning to, satisfying on several levels..." - Betsy Boyd

"When does language gain respect? More people have probably been moved by pop music than by anything a person has put to paper...Sometimes the best thing to do with a day is to spend it on quiet contemplation. Rock bottom is a concept that many strive for and few ever reach. For those few who reach rock bottom the surface glimmers with light the glass ceiling ready to be broken." - Beach Sloth

IPP is a collaborative effort directed by Amanda McCormick & Tracy Dimond.
Our mission is to blur the lines of genre in writing, visual, and performance art in Baltimore and the universe through the publication of handmade books, manual printing, and experimental events.

The Gin & Ink Workshop gathers local writers to meet informally every two or three weeks at a Baltimore location, usually Liam Flynn's Alehouse. Workshop games are played to break the ice. Anyone that brings writing reads their piece, then everyone discusses it in a friendly atmosphere.