“Dear Atom Bomb”
Collaborators’ Q&A: Poet Catherine Pierce: I imagined there might be a mushroom cloud, and there is, but it’s so jarring, the way we see it rising above the whole earth, the way it’s so angular and brightly colored…I really appreciate the in-your-face surprise of that. Artist Ira Joel Haber: I liked the bluntness of it, and the shortness of it and the references to a particular time that I also lived through. I can’t believe that this is my 13th broadside and I love each one of the collaborations and how different each one is.
Poet Catherine Pierce is the author of The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia, 2012), winner of the 2013 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Poetry. She lives in Starkville, Mississippi, where she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. Artist Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.