19. jeanne stauffer-merle
Inside this Split of Wind was a long time coming, shimmering on the waves, always approaching and moving further and further away. This book is the meeting of the mythic and painfully modern myopia, a mirror-dance of inside and out, of expanses collapsing into claustrophobic noise. Merle uses the page to weave and splash a looping clap against the boat, against the brain and the balance. How can you see it in the distance my friend, when you are up so close?
With Illustrations by Jessica Seamans
Jeanne Stauffer-Merle lives on a curious little planet that doesn’t have eyes or ears, but does have an enormous tongue with impossibly long (ravishing, terrifying) fingers. She finds troubling parts of this world everywhere, flickering like lost shadows of icy light, and these bits and pieces boil and burble until they insist on becoming poems (and some really pushy ones have ended up in such tolerant venues as The Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, Sentence, Caketrain, The Mad Hatter Review, among others, or have gathered themselves arrogantly into a book, Here in the Ice House, Finishing Line Press). But her favorites do nothing at all, and instead take quiet refuge in the unspeakable beauties: the silent insistence of the tree, the soft desperation of earth, the mercy of dolphins.
Jessica Seamans is an illustrator, printmaker and future ceramicist currently living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She enjoys racquetball, plants, and spending time with women much older than herself. Much of her illustration work can be found online at landland.net.
32pgs., cover letterpressed on elephant skin textured stock. hand-sewn, etc.
first printing Dec. 2014 – Oxford, Oh
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