collaboration

[REVIEW] Intimates and Fools, Poetry by Laura Madeline Wiseman with Art by Sally Deskins

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Intimates and fools

Les Femmes Folles Press

38 pages, $14

 

Review by Jen Lambert

 

One of the things I admire most about poetry is that sometimes what’s not on the page is what’s most important. This vacancy is like an invitation in to the intimate space of self-interpretation, and it speaks volumes about the poet’s trust in her readers.

Intimates and Fools, a collaborative art and poetry book by Laura Madeline Wiseman and Sally Deskins, dedicated to the sometimes complicated female relationship with the bra, is the antithesis of vacant. Deskins’s own art, colorful sketches and body prints, unapologetically splash across the page in bright strokes while Wiseman’s handwritten prose snakes up and around, balancing and accompanying the art. The white space and sparse font that usually turns me on is clearly abused in this collection, but nonetheless, I found myself intrigued. This book required a different kind of poetic experience than which I’ve grown accustomed. It made me want to linger, to touch the page, run my hands across the color and script. It was more of an experience than just interpretation. The poems themselves were artistic, relying on a loopy longhand font, which at first I found distracting, but ultimately I grew to admire its comforting lines, personal and familiar. This collection has been called playful, fun, a “table top” book of color and tongue in cheek commentary on feminism, and while the premise is lively and energetic, even a bit feisty, I think it would be a shame not to recognize its deeply contemplative side as well. While the pages of this collection are full – Deskins’s brushstrokes and Wiseman’s stanzas crowd up against each other on every page – it’s what’s just under the busy surface that’s most appealing: the wildly complex social constructs of female body, and the symbol of the bra as the ultimate carrier of all things female: shame, sexuality, strength. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Music for another life, by Kristina Marie Darling and Max Avi Kaplan

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music

BlazeVOX Books
77 pages, $18.00

Review by Anne Champion

Kristina Marie Darling, already an accomplished poet in her own right (she’s published sixteen poetry collections), has begun paving a new trail with her foray into collaborative writing. Her previous collaborations work alongside poet Carol Guess, but her newest work, Music for another life, collaborates with the accomplished visual artist and scholar, Max Avi Kaplan, and the finished product is a brilliant and moving piece of art. The cover, featuring a Marilyn Monroe look-a-like donned in Jacqueline Kennedy inspired attire, chillingly depicts a woman laying in grass in a corpse pose, and this image foreshadows what’s to come: stunning, delicate beauty that adheres to societal standards juxtaposed with hauntingly devastating realities.

The narrative, composed solely of short prose poems, follows a speaker named Adelle as she traverses her lavish landscape in heels, swanky sunglasses, and pencil skirts. Each page features a different picture of Adelle—either standing outside of her domestic sphere or lounging in nature. The work of light and shadow in these photographs speaks volumes to the Adelle’s search for self and inability to find it, either from being blinded, outshined, or blurred into unrecognizablity. Some of the poses only vary slightly, so you can flip through the pictures quickly and watch Adelle move as if she were an animation. Regardless of the various ways you can look at and interpret the images, the most important thing they do is immerse the reader in a very real and detailed world: paired with the poetry, it’s hard not to empathize with the character while also feeling as trapped and suffocated as she does, despite the fact that she clearly frolics in an upper class status. Maybe even because of it. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] X Marks the Dress: A Registry, by Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess

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XMarkstheDressCover
Goldwake Press
102 pages/ $15.95

Review by Carlo Matos

X Marks the Dress, a wonderful and entertaining collaboration between Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess, takes the shape of a registry: the marriage, so to speak, of ritual and consumerism; that is, the economic reinforcement of the hetero-normative traditions and social conventions that govern and limit marriage practices. A registry is, of course, first and foremost a collection of things. In previous books, Kristina Marie Darling has explored how the things that remain from failed relationships can bury, bind or enslave the beloved and how those individual items are culturally situated along the lines of gender and power. Darling says in an interview at heavy feather review that she wanted to “defamiliarize many of the objects, rituals and conventions associated with weddings,” and I think Darling and Guess have succeeded in accomplishing that goal without getting too bogged down in polemic.

In Appendix A, there is a footnote that references an “autobiographical novel [that] depicts a heroine’s pursuit of an alternative to marriage, particularly the social conventions governing the ceremony itself.” The authors very plainly play with the notion that marriage means man-and-wife. I have to admit to my great consternation that it was far too easy for me to simply assume that the marriage was between a woman and a man. In fact, it seems to me that the book is calculated to lure the reader into this too-easy assumption in order to, like Ibsen loved to do to his audiences in the nineteenth-century, jar us into recognition. The duo is actually a trio: “I’m tired of threeways where no one gets fucked” (“[Wedding Favor: Coin Purse]”). The male figure is transgender: “I can’t keep my two lives together much longer. Once the M on my license goes missing, our marriage dissolves: two women mean nothing” (“Pearl-handled Letter Opener”). The female character had a secret second wedding: “Darling, you know how my mother and father rejected me? . . . Well, I told my parents I was marrying a man. I hired an actor to play my husband” (“Pizza”). Continue reading →