Lori Anderson Moseman
Note
I composed these “tattered sun bonnets” in InDesign as two-page spreads over several months: on the left page, I sequenced seven stolen sentences; on the right I refashioned the content of those sentences. Then, I went back to the left page and did an “erasure” by making most of the source texts a faint grey. (That layer seems, delightfully so, to have vanished in this web version.)
Why sample these particular texts? I thought I might have to move (again) and downsize my book collection. From the pile of books entitled I-want-to-spend-more-time-with-you-before-we-part, I selected seven art books and lifted one sentence from each in a single writing session, making sure the resulting collage fit on 14 lines. The resulting narrative (?) that emerged over the arc of all seven poems remains mysterious even to me. (Election year panic?)
The pixelated color blocks were seven tiny scanned samples from corners of the source book covers and some of my own photos. InDesign allows you to zoom and crop at absurd levels of “proximity” to images. So, for each two-page spread, I played with different parts of the same seven samples. If the resulting color blasts aesthetically reflect any of the source art books, it would be Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Early Avant-Garde 1910-1913. (That book, by the way, was a gift from Meredith Stricker whose work inspires me daily.)
Poet Lori Anderson Moseman poetry collections are All Steel (Flim Forum Press), Temporary Bunk (Swank Books), Persona (Swank Books), and Cultivating Excess (The Eighth Mountain Press). Her chapbooks are Host (Nous-Zot) and Walking The Dead (Heaven Bone). A collaboration with book artist Karen Pava Randall, Full Quiver, was just released by Propolis Press; its companion 40-poem cycle, Flash Mob, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil.
To celebrate writers and artists whose creativity buoys others, Anderson Moseman founded the press, Stockport Flats, in the wake of Federal Disaster #1649, a flood along the Upper Delaware River. The essay, “insistence, teeth” is a collaboration with printmaker Sheila Goloborotko featured in Dusie Magazine, Issue 17: Ecopoetics. With a team of Stockport Flats writers, Anderson Moseman writes about creation myths enacted in Golobortko’s Creation. Anderson Moseman’s poems about Goloborotko’s monotypes are featured (in English and Portuguese) in um daqueles lugares sublimes, an exhibition catalogue for galeria Gravura Brasileira. Double | Vigil, a poetic collaboration with Belle Gironda, is a vigil for the people of Egypt. Parts of that are excerpted online in the journal Barzakh.
Recently, her poetry has appeared in: 100WordStory, Barzakh, dislocate, divide, Epoch, In/Filtration: An anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson Valley, PEEP/SHOW: A Taxonomic Exercise in Textual and Visual Seriality, Portland Review, Stolen Island, Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, Trickhouse.org, Tonopah Review, The Volta.org., Water~Stone, and Zócalo Public Square.