Bound Together :: Sherese Francis & Edwin Torres
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THE MANUSCRIPT
Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight conjures both ancestors and futures through a series of ekphrastic poems inspired by Sol Sax’s exhibition Sol’Sain’t Many Kin: All Sol’Skin is a Free Kin. Like Sax's work, these poems interplay between black memory, art, mythology and history as well as reflect on presence in relation to the world, whether that world is the earth, the body, or our concept of self or language. Structurally inventive, prayerful, playful, and powerful, these poems praise and break language, loosing buried meanings and opening word-shaped portals.
THE AUTHOR
Sherese Francis is a Queens-based poet, text artist, workshop facilitator, and literary curator of the mobile library project, J. Expressions. She has published in journals and anthologies including Furious Flower, Obsidian Lit, The Operating System, Cosmonauts Avenue, No Dear, Apex Magazine, La Pluma Y La Tinta’s New Voices Anthology, The Pierian Literary Review, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, Newtown Literary, and Free Verse. Additionally, she has published two chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls and Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling. Sherese is currently an editor for Harlequin Creature. To find out more about her work, visit futuristicallyancient.com.
THE MANUSCRIPT
THE ANIMAL’S PERCEPTION OF EARTH is both a long poem in sections and a manuscript of 28 formally diverse lyrics that, read together, function as a modular narrative of language sensing both its own shape and the contours of the world it inhabits. Torres' distinctive linguistic experimentation takes on the systems approach of ecology in these poems, flirting with and overstepping the boundaries between human and animal and between connotation and denotation. Connecting through ecology and fracture, continually turning like the helixes that encode all life, these poems invite and estrange, and ask what words do.
THE AUTHOR
Edwin Torres is the author of 10 poetry collections including, XoeteoX: the infinite word object (Wave Books 2018), Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press 2014), Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books 2010), The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books 2008), and is editor of The Body In Language: An Anthology (Counterpath Press 2019). He has performed his multi-disciplinary work since the early 90's and received fellowships from; The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performing Arts, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Fund, and The Poets Fund among others. Anthologies include Who Will Speak For America (Temple University Press), American Poets In The 21st Century: The Poetics Of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press), Postmodern American Poetry Vol. 2 (Norton), Kindergarde: Avant Garde Poems For Children (Black Radish Books) and Aloud: Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Café (Holt).
Francis Excerpt
a boxer of stings WAMA
a cock’s comb of floats
a bang of symbols against the head:
rope a veil around the sight
the hem of power
the priest’s tasseled
tasered shawl
touch them BAMA
and receive a SHOCK
with a gateway of gall
jelled in its stinger
catch these hands
breaking you open
into a collective
subconsciousness
Torres Excerpt
are there support mechanisms
for reimagining daylight as touchlight
or even to give touch a second life
as night
or maybe the spin I’m on
is not what I need
but had privilege for
after time spent shedding the external
this is just me
trying to find where I was
in my most intimate vulnerability
how honest you might say
after years
in the mire of subtlety and texture
one is allowed
immediacy
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