Mar 4, 2015
This week’s Snapshots diverge and intersect with one another. Where the words end and my body begins explores the depths of the body and rewrites her state of being, while Safely Home Pacific Western rewrites the mind in order to uncover the beauty of object and place. The Uncertainty Principle brings the body, the being, the object, and the word all together at once, as if Bennett were wrapping up Latosik and Dawn’s words in her own creation and understanding of the world.
Where the words end and my body begins
by
Arsenal Pulp Press
In Where the words end and my body begins writer, filmmaker, and performance artist Amber Dawn rebuilds her glosa poems by constructing them on quotations from queer, gender-creative, feminist, and/or survivor writers. Dawn uses repetition as a method of regeneration to revitalize the seemingly strict structures of the glosa form and to transform her poems into something powerful and subversive. “If possible,” she writes, “hear me tell a different story. / Survivorship is not hard stars, it’s not a dim fable fucking / with me.” Based on the words of Bachinsky, Stein, Clifton, Horlick, Queyras and many inspiring writers, Dawn deconstructs what we think we know in order to put our ideas back together again in a different order. In “Mother Did her Own Stunts” she challenges the distinctions between film and life, tearing them apart at the seams: “Costume blood: / and tomato, glass shard crown. What if / your father never got up from the ground? / Letterbox what memory has recorded / borders of the Real, surrounded“. Although seemingly chaotic, Dawn’s poetry does not let anything go unchecked: “Apathy is / the world’s worst lover, over and over. // Queer Infinity”