“observing a coma”
Collaborators’ Q&A: Artist Kara Page: I started with a pre-existing print, then added new elements and changed the block, which shifted how I saw the original work. Revisiting it this way made the piece feel sharper, more urgent, and highlighted how small gestures—a missing eye, a torn face—can carry so much weight. Poet Alaina Stellwagen: The artist’s visual response opened a new door to my poem, making me reevaluate it (in a very good way!)—holding the poem’s brokenness and pain in tension with hope and a looking towards the future.
Artist Kara Page is a middle school art teacher from the Midwest with roots in the Rocky Mountains. Poet Alaina Stellwagen is an MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she studies poetry.