Two Poems excerpted from LEAF by Carolyn Guinzio

I WANTED TO WATCH HER WITHOUT HER SEEING ME

BREAK TIME INTO PIECES

Author’s Note

In the sequence LEAF, meant to echo lacunae, fragments of handwritten text are partially legible, read through the holes in leaves, and disintegrating into the (disintegrating) leaves. The source of the text varies from poems to field notes, essay fragments, poems, and journal entries. The illegibility is meant to acknowledge the challenge of endeavoring to make something lasting, and the project chooses to hope that we can still reach each other somehow. That the text requires one to lean in closely is reflective of my desire for a sense of intimacy and warmth between viewer/reader and the pieces— a hand reaching out, heat rising off— to mitigate the coldness of digitally-created work.

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A poet and artist, Carolyn Guinzio is the author of A Vertigo Book (The Word Works, 2021), winner of the Tenth Gate Prize, and six other collections. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Yorker, and many other journals. A Chicago native, she has lived in the Ozark Mountains just outside Fayetteville, Arkansas since 2002.

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