"Her Many Feathered Bones"
art by Jessica Serran
poems by Eleanor Johnson

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$15 (includes domestic shipping)

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When the statuary in Jessica Serran and Eleanor Johnson’s collaborative work speaks (and it does), its disarticulated voices are "sick with reference." "Oh, the agony of address," says Johnson, "does anyone else feel this weary / thisness?" The reader feels in these articulations an economy of desiderata: knees, braids, claws, teeth, sheep, snakes, and at least one iguanodon. But the exchange between image and word values deliberation over excess, inspiring a range of attention that manages winningly to associate a striped sock with a "centaur’s knee ... moving through space" in the slowest of forms, the frieze. Is this a good thing? I think so, sympathizing as I do with the exhausted tourist caught "between graphic space and lyrical time" everywhere in life. Compositionally far from the rubble of past or future, Serran and Johnson’s combo of acute arrangement and tonic selection exhort the reader to be a reader (with a sense of humor) in the especially peculiar and difficult present.

-Jean Day

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Eleanor Johnson is a scholar of medieval literature and poetics at Columbia University; she studies the formal and theoretical relationships between prose and poetry, and how those two forms operate individually and occasionally join forces to create self-consciously transformative works. Her other poetry publications include The Dwell (Scrambler Books, 2009), and selected publications on shampoopoetry.com

Jessica Serran’s work examines the intersecting points between personal and collective experience and the lines we draw between our public and private selves. Drawing and mark-making are central to this examination. Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, Serran earned a Bachelor’s degree in Illustration from the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI before moving to California for a Master’s degree in Transformative Arts from John F. Kennedy University. Her work has been exhibited within the U.S, Canada, and most recently the Czech Republic. She has received grants and awards from the Ontario Arts Council and the California Institute of Integral Studies, and she has lectured on art and transformation, community collaboration, and the role of the audience in contemporary art. She has been found doing her social interventions throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and Eastern Europe. More of her work can be found at jessicaserran.com.