Rene Livingston-DeTienne sent the final edits of her third poetry collection to her publisher just days before she died in January 2025. She was 53.
The book was finished. It just hadn’t reached readers yet.
That changes this weekend. Rene’s spouse, Dannee Livingston-DeTienne, will host a launch for “Bird, Bone, Blood” from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 18, at the Art + Literature Laboratory in Madison — a celebration with music, performances and Rene’s own artwork.
“This book really chronicles life to death,” Dannee said in an interview for the Madison365’s 365 Amplified podcast.
Listen to the full interview:
‘She really wore her heart on her sleeve’
Rene, who wrote under the pen name R.B. Simons, had her hands in a lot of different things. She worked in peer support, advocated for harm reduction and was active in social justice and community organizing. She also served as managing editor of Harper’s Review.
“She was quite the woman,” Dannee said.
And she wrote constantly. “I went through and attempted to count how many poems she had published, and I got to about 50 publications in different journals, probably missing some there,” Dannee said. Her poems won a number of prizes along the way.
She came to poetry seriously later than many writers. Rene had always written and made art, but she started writing poetry in earnest in 2018, in her 40s, while taking a course at Madison College. When she went to a poetry slam, someone convinced her to perform.
“She’s like, ‘No, I’m not — I’m not good enough,'” Dannee recalled.
The poem she performed went on to appear in several journals and in one of her books. “Her professor and those around her were like, ‘You really need to look at publishing.’ And she was like, ‘What, me? No, I’m not good enough for that,'” Dannee said.
That moment launched her career. Around then she met local performing artist and producer T.S. Banks, who became a key collaborator. “T was really a big force in her life surrounding poetry,” Dannee said. Rene performed at the Black Theater Festival, which Banks co-founded with Dana Pellebon.
Three books followed in five years: “The Good Truth” (Finishing Line Press, 2021), “Not Just the Fire” (2023) and now “Bird, Bone, Blood.”
Her work, Dannee said, “really centered around issues of identity and transformation, and the moments and memories that make us who we are, intersectionally and in totality.”
“She really focused on her authentic self and talking about who she was, and really wore her heart on her sleeve,” Dannee said. “Unlike me. I’m much more of a private person.”
Rene wrote about “the realities of growing up mixed race, Black, queer, fat, disabled and female in a world that really doesn’t see value in it,” Dannee said. “But through the poetry, you can really hear tenderness and then resilience that really carries far beyond the pages.”
Rene often turned to the natural world to do it, Dannee said.
“She used a lot of organic and uncultivated landscapes to illustrate ideas and our place in the natural world, and really evoke a very visceral response to folks in the audience,” Dannee said.
Bird, bone, blood
Rene considered “Bird, Bone, Blood” part memoir and part manifesto. In it, Dannee said, “she examined multiple identities that one must reconcile every day to just survive what feels unendurable.” The poems trace a life moving from past trauma, fear and terror toward an authentic self, in a society that, as Dannee put it, “really prefers masks.”
The title maps that journey. The bird is the beginning.
“You think of a bird, right? That is fledgling … trying to figure it out. It’s in its infancy stage,” Dannee said.
Bone is the passage from childhood into adulthood, “the trauma and the hardships, but then intermixed with that is the resiliency of that.” And blood, Dannee said, “represents flowing, and becoming her true authentic self and embracing her past into becoming who she had become.”
The book also looks squarely at death. Rene lived with chronic illness and disability, and she had long sensed her life would be short.
“She talks a lot about death in this last book,” Dannee said. “She always felt that she was going to die young, and, you know, this certainly wasn’t an expected death. But she did have chronic health issues, chronic illness, disability, and so it’s just really fascinating to read this poetry and read about dying.”
The collection opens with a prologue poem, “Augury.” It ends:
Swallow the feast in its inheritance of atoms, I let the legacy linger, unnamed on my tongue, unbound, bare, breathing, content, knowing who will bury me and why.
After Rene’s death, the remaining work fell to Dannee. The biggest task was a short one on the page: the foreword.
“It took me a long time to write the foreword, which ended up just being a few sentences long, but you know, I really wanted to do it justice, so that probably took me many, many months,” Dannee said.
The book’s publisher, Milk & Cake Press, is a very small press, and finding a release date took time. Dannee said the press has “been amazing.”
“So, the day is now here,” Dannee said.
A launch that brings the poems to life
“I’m so excited to be hosting this event,” Dannee said.
Sunday’s launch won’t be a typical book reading. T.S. Banks, founder of Loud ‘n Unchained, is producing the show. Banks knew Rene from the very start of her poetry career, and the two worked together on many projects over the years.
Dannee and Banks are working to turn the afternoon into a full production, “taking Rene’s art and really making it come alive through different performances,” Dannee said, with singers and live music.
“I think we’ve got 13 folks performing or involved in some capacity,” Dannee said. “I’m always trying to do too much.”
Rene also worked across many visual art mediums, and prints of her artwork will be available at the event alongside copies of the book.
The launch will take place at the Art + Literature Laboratory, which Dannee called a “really important venue for Rene.” Tickets are not required, but registration is appreciated at this link. You can also view the event remotely at this link.
