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After river-gathering elsewhere, a vessel arrives, catches. The story may be different where you are, but this time it was dipped then dropped by a stoop-weary nun. Lucky you who found it anyway, wet glint in sand. Now take out the people. A shard meshed in a river god's hair slowly reaches the lap of a waiting cypress. Nicks until sap beads but stays. Now X the gods. River touches sea and can’t return.
DOWN WATER STREET
Terri Witek is the author of 8 previous full-length books of poems and many chapbooks: the most recent, Something’s Missing in This Museum, was published by Anhinga Press in 2023. Exit Island was a Florida Book Award medalist; The Rape Kit was the Slope Editions Prize 2018 winner, judged by Dawn Lundy Martin. Martin calls The Rape Kit “ a grand success, the best we’ll get. Fresh, relevant, and heartbreaking” and “a fire in the throat of a culture that has no appropriate language for rape and its aftermath…” Witek’s visual poetics work is featured in JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (2021), and in the WAAVe Global Gallery of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry (2021) as well as in arts venues. The poet’s collaborations with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes (cyriacolopes.com) have, since 2005, been shown nationally and internationally: in New York, Seoul, Miami, Lisbon, Valencia (Spain) and Rio de Janeiro. The duo have been represented by The Liminal gallery in Valencia: their most recent collaboration was featured at ARCO, Madrid (2023) where the Liminal won special jury mention. Since 2011, collaborations with new media artist Matt Roberts (mattroberts.com) often use augmented reality technology and have been featured in Matanza (Colombia), Lisbon, Glasgow, Vancouver, and Miami. Recent collaborative work with poet Amaranth Borsuk loops the pandemic and the eco-crisis as a crisis of rain and smoke between worlds; that with weaver Paula Damm combines text/textile. Individual and collaborative work has been featured in a wide variety of text venues, including Fence, The Colorado Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Slate, Hudson Review, Lana Turner, The New Republic, and many other journals and anthologies. With Cyriaco Lopes, Witek team-teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas; they also run The Fernando Pessoa Game as faculty in the summer Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Witek holds the university’s Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing and is the recipient of both the McInery Award and the John Hague Award for teaching. terriwitek.com This is Witek’s second above/ground press title, after the collaborative W / \ S H: INITIAL CONTACT (2021), with Amaranth Borsuk. To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com
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Who first claimed the wound couldn’t hear? Maybe day drumming gray past the sills.
SOMETHING’S MISSING IN THIS MUSEUM
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The Rattle Egg
“Is the egg obvious? Witek’s visual text candles language in this volume of discovery, overjoyed and overwhelmed by the maps that link body and vocabulary through egg and ova. Behind this text is a poet with two mother tongues, playing between Portuguese and English with skill and beauty—yoking words. These poems know that hatchlings imprint on their caretaker, but the tether is mutual. Just as the ovum, and the fetus it later becomes, leaves behind its trace in the body as dna not the parent’s own. We are thus connected to our little eggs much like the thread with a needle on each end in Witek’s text: pierced and sutured in perpetual equipoise. With beauty and humor, bravery and brio, this book illuminates hidden connections. Bravo!” –Amaranth Borsuk
–Amaranth Borsuk -
warning: not a dichotomy. prompt: use a vertical so it doesn’t = hierarchy.
WAAVe Global Anthology of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry
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island, I've heard
the once-hated return
if you touch (please)
your stone lips to the seaThe Rape Kit
Poems by Terri Witek
"What The Rape Kit does with such ranging precision is expose the apparatus, which is the tenacious glue that holds us all in a stupid place. Terri Witek has changed my mind. Rape is not an unsayable experience. Its trauma might be beyond ordinary speech. But it is not beyond poetry. Rope or no rope."
Dawn Lundy Martin -
The world was at its end again.
The houses all wore hats of fire.
We couldn’t find each other.Body Switch
Poems by Terri Witek
"'The mind's eye detonates / is detonated' through these poems, at once explosively original and meticulously woven in the 'whipstitch of time,' through dreams, notes, and practices, where Witek suspends and breaks the lyric line, cast 'everywhere before her into the world.'"
Ronaldo Wilson -
two days after a possum
was dragged through our lawnFirst Shot At
Fort Sumter / PossumA Chapbook
Terri Witek’s First Shot At Fort Sumter / Possum blends war comic word balloons and iconography with a dual text concerning a dead possum: all to beguiling results.
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in a sea without sound
each wave’s a shadowExit Island
Poems by Terri Witek
Ariadne has been abandoned by the captain of a great ship after one last night of love. Fortunately, she’s washed up with the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, who appears as a different man in each book.
