The HYIR: It’s a review, it’s a collaborative grab-bag, it’s a panoply of voices and visions… it’s the annual Haiku Year-In-Review (henceforth referred to as HYIR). The purpose: to celebrate, examine, and honor the past year in poetry and art. The editors of Broadsided Press have come together to offer, in the spirit of the Carrier’s Address, a brief overview of 2020—it is eclectic, noncomprehensive, and heart-led—just as the work of Broadsided Press itself is. …
Collaborators’s Q&A: Poet Jennifer Perrine: I was just over two weeks into sheltering at home when I saw the “Sense of Home” prompts in my inbox. I’m not sure I can adequately describe the glee and gratitude I felt when I read them, especially the Beautiful Outlaw prompt. I had been trying to write about the chaos and disorientation of those early days when I first recognized the severity of the pandemic, and hadn’t had much luck…. Artist Michele L’Heureux: I love how nuanced and tender the poem is, how it uses a capsule of daily life for two people in love as a vehicle to convey the complexity of our current times. It is both heartwarming and heart-wrenching at the same time.
Poet Jennifer Perrine is the author of three books of poetry: The Body Is No Machine; In the Human Zoo; and No Confession, No Mass, winner of the Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Artist Michele L’Heureux is an artist and bird fanatic who works as a digital designer for a medical software company.
NOTE: This broadside is one of six published for our “Bearing Arms: Responding to Guns in American Culture” special feature.
Collaborators’ Q&A:
Why did this piece of art resonate for you or seem like it would give you an avenue into writing about this subject? Poet Jennifer Perrine: “Female Target” brought me out of abstractions, out of lives that I know only through news and public events, and returned me to my body, my relationship to guns.
What is behind your choice of this piece of art in response to the topic “Guns in American Culture”? Artist Kristen T. Woodward: I’ve been painting on pre-printed gun targets for the past ten years or so… When confronted by a feminine form, a number of people shifted the conversation to domestic violence.
Note: “Ex Ovo Omnia” is a Switcheroo, an annual feature in which we invite writers to respond to art we post.
Collaborators’ Q&A
What surprises you about Jennifer’s poem in conversation with your art? Artist Julie Evanoff: Honestly, I’m surprised that she was able to pull out what seems like such a specific narrative that goes deep into the myths and stories that inform our collective and individual unconscious in a way that resonates with my sense of the painting.
What leapt out first from Julie’s art? A particular image? A mood? A line? Poet Jennifer Perrine: At first, I saw red. I was drawn in by that color, especially by the red-bodied figure on the right, and it wasn’t until days later that I realized it had reminded me of the character I’d imagined when I read Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (which I love!).