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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.
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Circle a wallet’s dream of a gutter.
Circle two silos hungry for summer.The Shipwreck Dress
Poems by Terri Witek
A series of two-sided “kimono” thread together poems about danger, disaster, and clothing.
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Viewer, it’s night.
I’m locked into a straightening deviceCarnal World
Poems by Terri Witek
People sit well or poorly for paintings.
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Work. A shiver of morning. A dove-silvered sky,
These are the delights we measure him by.Fools & Crows
Poems by Terri Witek
17th century paintings and woodcuts dare the poet to walk in.
