Jane Blanchard
"Disturbance is the raison d'étre for / a snow globe, though.
"
Barbara Lydecker Crane
"Sporadic colored spotlights throw / black shapes that lurk and stalk and slide"
Mary Cresswell
"…you just wake with faces. The names dig deep"
Barbara Crooker
"Old marrieds, we knew how to fit / Tab A, Slot B, the necessary friction"
Sarah-Jane Crowson
"Your words are candy floss dissolved in rain"
Claudia Gary
"So she keeps, who never chose, / her heliophobic skin"
Julia Griffin
"Keep the memorial so: our broken hands"
Mia Schilling Grogan
"Already I'm becoming an old lady."
Kathryn Jacobs
"school's like TV, full of talking heads"
Jen Karetnick
"Dignity, earned, is like belief"
Jean L. Kreiling
"You do in fact need all those books"
Jenna Le
"Olympians whose cragged peak pricks the blue"
Kathleen McClung
"I am a virtuoso of deceit"
Diane Lee Moomey
"I plunge my hand into the silent dark"
Leslie Schultz
"engraved glittering glyphs of the zodiac"
Natalie Staples
"I was a quiver caught in summer's spell"
Kathrine Varnes
"I am the Goddess of Unfinished Tasks"
Joyce Wilson
"We saw how much our lives were not the same"
Marly Youmans
"The world was hushed, in perfect rhyme"
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| Maureen Alsop:I often create visual art as a memorialization to the closure of a written work. However, many of these visual pieces arrived as a trajectory while writing a larger 'work-in-progress.' The text within the visual poems do not speak to the content of the larger work but are autonomous, acting as bridge between the written and visual bodies. The original text draws upon ghosts in the hall of battles. It is a glittering solar analemma, an unattested revolution, an infinity reflected in ellipses, omissions, and disintegration. A full collection representing many of these images came to fruition recently in Tender to Empress (Wet Cement Press). Yet the act of creating from text continues, as the digital collages here also include newer works based on miscellaneous notes, old emails, and most recently a short story, "The Unnamed Woman of Mary River" (forthcoming at South Dakota Review). The title to these are based on cargo ships which I pass on my daily commute from island to mainland. These small cities of people, afloat for weeks on end out at sea, are a looming story that embarks and disembarks in my imagination.
The visual poems are crafted under the mechanics of "Écriture Féminine," literally "women's writing." These principals advance a feminine perspective. I write from parallels, cyclical slips through stream of conscious and fragmentary processes. The writing exists as rough erotic. As talisman. Interpersonal in their ruptures and syntax, soft in their discomforts; a splintered narrative. Through writing, I can go anywhere and never be found.
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