LIKENESS by Katrina Roberts

Description

LIKENESS

by Katrina Roberts

$22.99, Full-length, paper

979-8-88838-047-5

2022

Praised for work named restless, urgent, generous, elegant, and visionary, poet-artist Katrina Roberts returns with the hybrid-text LIKENESS — an innovative, full-color lyrical meditation of verbal and visual images interlaced to make poems, a book that explores what it means to be alive during fractured times. Navigating art-historical concepts and tropes, embracing kinship with the experimental tradition of comics, and engaging in conversation with wide-ranging articulations of poetry, LIKENESS enacts the unsayable in terms neither entirely visceral nor cerebral, revealing sense via poetic syntaxes most aligned with the music and gestures of architecture and dance.

Negative space, color, and proximity emerge as shared points of entry into a sequence set on discovering what “likeness” means. The book’s four sections travel via conjunctions of words and pictures rendered in ink and color wash, sometimes informed by ancient tangrams, often impelled by ekphrasis, and just as frequently invented through the pure dynamic happenstance of shapes one might glimpse in shifting clouds — all while deliberating what living might be “like.” “See,” LIKENESS says again and again, slippery yet determined, “like this, and this, and this.”

Marrying the ordinary with enchantment, tethering the earthly and ascendant, in LIKENESS, Roberts wrestles ideas about identity, responsibility, domesticity, home, violence, gender, and faith. How do we hold sorrows for our ravaged planet, for all creatures, for our children and elders, for others, for ourselves; how do we counter belief in irrelevance, pointlessness, disenfranchised loneliness? Using figuration, metaphor, mashup, and representation, while embracing the surreal, fabulist, and mythic, Roberts offers reiterations of the multiple-self as palimpsest and catalyst, as mosaic and bridge, as inheritance and invention. The visual poems in LIKENESS introduce possibilities of empathy through alchemical transformations, finding meaning mirrored and framed abundantly in both constructed and natural worlds. LIKENESS builds as a fugue via drawings and words, reckoning with embodied identity post-trauma and loss; the book’s horizons gaze widely at syzygies of mathematical rationality and dream, gravity and play; trauma and wonder, fame and utility; violence and safety; fixity and fluidity, death and immortality, science-historical ambition and illumination via faith in the everyday.

As the title suggests, LIKENESS queries resemblance, affection, affectation, appropriation, allusion, echo, iteration, and illumination in visual poems that explore our multi-faceted roles and identities with all their attendant mixed blessings, beauties, and bodily burdens. Here is a book that considers the constraints and freedoms of our multiplicity/hybridity/fluidity in the face of illness, injury, loss, societal/global violences, and ecological devastations. The multiply-slash-identified Roberts muses in LIKENESS on the possibility of a “new” visual poetry, and on hope discovered while embracing negative space, edges, diagrams, margins, places on maps (inherited/inherent) where we might blur lines, acknowledging alikeness, even while honoring distinctions. In this strange, bold, refreshing book LIKENESS, poetic line, color, paradox, and silent musical notations combust in the space they inhabit together, to invite sanctuary in communion, solace in humor, and salvation in joy.

Katrina Roberts is the author of Underdog; Friendly Fire; The Quick; How Late Desire Looks, and Lace. She edited the anthology Because You Asked: A Book of Answers on the Art & Craft of the Writing Life. Her poems have been included in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, and elsewhere. Her visual erasures and reviews, poetry comics, and graphic pieces appear widely in journals such as BOMB, Brink, Interim, The Ilanot Review, Thrush, American Journal of Poetry, Root & Star, Poetry Northwest, Permafrost, The Journal, and in anthologies including Evergreen: Fairy Tales, Essays, and Fables from the Dark Northwest. She writes and draws in Walla Walla, Washington, where she tends to vines and animals; teaches, and curates the Visiting Writers Reading Series at Whitman College; and co-runs Tytonidae Cellars & the Walla Walla Distilling Company. (Please find more here: www.katrinaroberts.net)