Poetry By Chance

Writers of all ages and levels of experience have been using Taylor Mali’s Metaphor Dice for years to explore and revel in the formulaic nature of metaphors. The game gives you a collection of three different concepts or language tools that create a metaphor, and it is up to the poet to fill in the rest of the poem based on their roll. Some metaphors work and some don’t. Some are immediately hilarious while others slowly reveal themselves to be astonishingly insightful. Poetry By Chance is the first collection of poems that were all prompted by different rolls of Metaphor Dice, featuring submitters from the inaugural Golden Die Contest.

After reading through this collection, you can’t help but see the power of metaphor in understanding the world around us. In this anthology there is no singular poetic style or voice, but rather a collection of unique voices and perspectives for each roll. With some deeply personal, and some widely universalizing, one thing is clear: these poems are the brainchild of an ingenious, yet simple, writing tool.