Illusory Borders

"Heidi Reszies's book, Illusory Borders, wanders intriguingly along the edges of what making is: making a world, a garden, a book / making textiles, pictures, poems / making a home, making a way, making a life. In all these permutations of forging, which is to say apprehending, Reszies creates a constellated texture of convergence as the natural world moves through its life cycle, burgeoning and brimming and collapsing, and the interior world moves alongside, filling in the emotional gaps with guesses and glimpses of light. The poems themselves are scattered like seeds over the pages, spacious and spare, annotated with the ideas that exist--invisible but felt--in the in-between. Indeed, the majority of the text falls in what might be called the margins, the periphery, layering a delicate archive of moods throughout the pages, tenderly yielding a place for the smallest, most glimmery shred of hope to bloom like breath against glass that, when finally cleared, gives 'a window inside another window inside.'" - Allison Titus

Illusory Borders is grounded in a process that incorporates fragments, lists, and reflections on 'woman's work.' It is inspired, in part, by lists discovered in a woman's day-planner from the 1940's (a DailyAide Silent Secretary), as well as an erasure created a few years ago from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons -- in particular, the section titled "Objects." This erasure became a list poem which was explored/enacted in different ways over time, eventually creating a series of prose poems/a long poem stitched together by fragments that cut and collaged from that original list. This series/long poem seeks to expand liminal spaces, marginality, the unsaid, the footnotes of dailyness and everyday objects, as well as the artist's necessity of working in a series: continually ending and beginning.

Excerpts appear at:

La Vague:
http: //lavaguejournal.com/lavague08/reszies.php

Leveler Poetry:
http: //www.levelerpoetry.com/from-a-paper-likeness-levelheaded/

HEIDI RESZIES is a poet and transdisciplinary artist. She earned an MFA in Writing with a concentration in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and was a 2015 James Merrill Poetry Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry collection titled 'Of Water & Other Soft Constructions' was selected by Samiya Bashir as the winner of the Anhinga Press 2018 Robert Dana Prize for Poetry. She is the founding creator/curator of Artifact Press, and currently resides in Richmond, Virginia where she teaches letterpress printing at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. Find her at heidireszies.com.