“Fishing Dead Frogs Out of My In-Law’s Pool”
Collaborators’ Q&A: Poet Jared Harél: I like the idea of finding art in unexpected places. I often come across signs and billboards that feel unintentionally poetic, which is fun, but I’m also interested in people surveying flyers for guitar lessons or apartment subletters and without warning, reading a poem. Artist Cheryl Gross: This is part of a larger series I made, Commit to Memory: The Precipice of Extinction, a social commentary addressing the shifting and eventual disappearance of our culture using animals as metaphors to represent society teetering on the verge of collapse.
Poet Jared Harél is the author of Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, Winner of the 2022 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry (forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press, Sept. 2023) and Go Because I Love You(Diode Editions, 2018.) Artist Cheryl Gross was recent winner of the Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition at the IndieCork Festival, for “In The Circus Of You.” Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, her urban influence has indeed added an “edge” to her work.