Projects
Tactile Erasures
“February” is a stitched erasure of the essay “A Good Oak,” from Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. I’d been thinking for a while about how climate change impacts landscapes over time, sometimes so slowly we barely notice, which makes it easy to deny it’s happening at all. When I came across Leopold's lines, “We were all awakened, one night in July, by the thunderous crash…but, since it had not hit us, we all went back to sleep,” my breath caught. How long will we all stay asleep? When will it hit us? I started removing as many references and images of nature from the text as possible, trying to make sense of what was left. What happens when all that remains is what we’ve created? I stitched the language together with colored thread to indicate section breaks and to breathe some life back into the otherwise scorched, black-and-white field of the page.
Originally published in Bramble
“Insured Patients” is rooted in parapraxis—the Freudian slip, the thing you didn’t know you were thinking that reveals itself in another way. I’d been researching the gendered response to threat of nuclear war in the 1950s and the sexualization of its propaganda for my new collection of poems, and when I read through the pamphlet “Survival Under Atomic Attack,” I tripped over the word “cancer.” It was hours after my annual mammogram, and I’d happened to grab a pamphlet on breast cancer screening while waiting. My mind immediately equated the two ideas. What is a body if not an atomic bomb in enemy hands? A few days later, I walked down an aisle of a craft store, saw some pink ribbon, and bought it. While my mother was treated for breast cancer and after she “survived,” she was surrounded by pink ribbons (the symbol of hope for breast cancer), pink quilts, pink Harley t-shirts... there was pink everywhere. When breast cancer finally killed her, we didn’t know what to do with all the pink she left behind. In this spirit, I used pink ribbon to block out whatever didn’t suit the developing poem and stitched the documents together to explore the complications of hope, our inability to comprehend our daily chances of survival, the fear of attack from both inside and outside our bodies, as well as the language government and other people in power use to distract us from these fears.
Originally published in Tupelo Quarterly
Video Poetry
How to Survive a Nuclear Attack
