AMARANTH BORSUK & KATE DURBIN
“Are you serious not knowing Poetry Goddesses? Prinking their raiments line after amazing line! The United States doesn’t need another feckless Poet Laureate stinking up the libraries of the world! No! The world NEEDS to see the real poets of the United States! The goddess poets! I worship there because I have sense! “song spun with lard and whiting in posy blanket” that’s what we’re talking about! Let ABRA blow the doors open, it’s time to staple it to the wall with Borsuk & Durbin! Open the book and let it all be done!”
–CA Conrad
Images by Zack Kleyn
A cell calls to itself, splits: a caul is knit. In the intimacy of the not-self-same is birthed a third thing: a second sight. Just so in the clairvoyant, collaborative between-spaces ( media) of Abra’s triple play. A ‘rococo glow’, a ‘sparkle spasm’, a transcriptase strip-tease at once cellular and galactic. Can protein have a fantasy life? Does cancer wish to conquer? Is thought just the comfort food our brain cells grant us while pursuing their own ends? The precise articulation of Abra reflects the considerable skill of its human compositors, yet hints at acute, occluded dramas unfolding just beyond human scales.
–Joyelle McSweeney
Amaranth Borsuk is a poet working across media platforms. Her books include Handiwork (Slope Editions), selected by Paul Hoover for the Slope Poetry Prize; Tonal Saw (The Song Cave), a chapbook-length erasure; and Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press), a book of augmented-reality poems created with Brad Bouse.
Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist. She is the author of The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), E! Entertainment (Wonder Press), and five chapbooks. She is founding editor of the online journal, Gaga Stigmata, and her tumblr project, Women as Objects, archives the teen girl tumblr aesthetic.
Zach Kleyn is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.