Terri Witek
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Books

  • #12: copies: I loved you in the hard old way by
  • Newsers
  • SOMETHING’S MISSING IN THIS MUSEUM
  • The Rattle Egg by Terri Witek
  • WAAVe Global Anthology of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry
  • Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry
  • Poesia Visual 5
  • The Rape Kit
  • Body Switch
  • First Shot At Fort Sumter / Possum
  • Exit Island
  • The Shipwreck Dress
  • Carnal World
  • Fools & Crows
  • Robert Lowell & Life Studies

Recent Work

  • Teaching with Cyriaco Lopes at the Hand Art Center ( June 2024 MFA residency at Stetson University)
  • Beyond the Illegible on Boundary Ave
  • Exit Island featured at show at The Liminal
  • ARCO Madrid
  • ARCO Madrid
  • Collaboration with Amaranth Borsuk

Edith Sitwell and the Carnal World

from Carnal World

In later life she made a lot of what
she christened her “Bastille…”
The Sitwells: A Family’s Biography

Think what an Equipage thou hast in air…
“The Rape of the Lock”

1

Viewer, it’s night. I’m locked into a straightening device.
So remove my flesh like an overly bulky gown
and trace my spine’s delicious curve, my nose’s
(one nostril’s been closed by a metal flap) small bend,
and the place where you can plump up like  aheart
behind twinned bars. I can still breathe one-sided poetry so will—
that the night, though long, retains a certain nasty gleam
can be seen in its spirits: fat bluebottle flies which have descended
(it’s summer in the Staffordshire), are drawn to the usual small,
dead thing, and are far more beautiful, in their blue carapaces,
than they deserve. But lost and stupid too.
What can they learn to love that’s here?
You’ve already picked me clean, bright thing—
you know the answer, beat doubled fists, and can’t refuse.

Buy the Book


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