September 19, 2009

Melissa Severin Tucks Rossi, Barbato, Heyd, & Olszewska


"Felt Scrap Reliquary"

Artist statement:

When a poem moves me I usually write it down a few times in a special notebook. Later, when a line spins in my head and my memory fails to conjure up book titles and poets' names, I page through the one of the notebooks. But a plain notebook rarely seems to do certain poems justice. I find myself wanting to capture them somehow, create a better space for them to inhabit.

Poems, like songs and stories, help see me through particular seasons or phases in my life; the words become part of my daydreams, I live the stories, hum a line and make it through a day. When I considered the Delirious Hem project, I just kept paging through my notebooks asking how I could respond creatively, without using my own words, to these works.

I am not a visual artist. I can't take a decent photograph. I can barely draw a line on a page. It's only by the coincidence of my sewing box being next to my bookshelves and notebooks that I even thought to make a better place to keep some of the poems. So, is a felt book a response to these poems? Perhaps not. It's more of a reliquary really--a place for poems to be folded and hidden in pockets that only I know about. They exist with images and object sewn alongside them. It's a scrapbook, a place to contextualize the poems with images that spark my own memories

I have many poems I could hide inside a book like this, but this one is devoted to particular poems:


MELISSA SEVERIN graduated from New England College with an MFA in poetry. She currently lives in Chicago whilst unemployed. But she eats her oatmeal everyday and goes jogging and says "in this economy" a lot which keep her positive. Her poems have appeared in MoonLit, 42Opus, Cultural Society, and other journals. Brute Fact, her chapbook, is available from dancing girl press.

Krista Franklin Opens a Window on Linda Susan Jackson



after Linda Susan Jackson's What Yellow Sounds Like (Tia Chucha Press, 2007)



KRISTA FRANKLIN is a poet and visual artist whose poetry and collages have been published most recently in Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam, Callaloo, MiPOesias.com, CultureServe.net, and the anthology Gathering Ground. Her collages have been featured on the covers of award-winning books, and exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a co-founder of Tres Colony, an artist collective, and a co-founder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars.

Krista Franklin Gilds Ruth Ellen Kocher


Collage by Krista Frankin, after "G/gnosis II Discipline" by Ruth Ellen Kocher.

G/gnosis II Discipline
Ruth Ellen Kocher

That summer My body forgot hesitation
wandered mountains met boys

whose faces lost soft curves spirit edged
stubble Tumble into manhood I called to it

tried to become one with it but again The body
floated afternoons in birch creek pools cutoffs

soaked through legs learning skin and skin.
Mornings feet caked black with culm

the paths through waste-land woods
followed us back to the apartment My body

hid from its parents Forgot its sisters Bathed
each morning as though performing ritual

leaving My body knew before I knew
Soon like hesitation It would forget return.


KRISTA FRANKLIN is a poet and visual artist whose poetry and collages have been published most recently in Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam, Callaloo, MiPOesias.com, CultureServe.net, and the anthology Gathering Ground. Her collages have been featured on the covers of award-winning books, and exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a co-founder of Tres Colony, an artist collective, and a co-founder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars.