Avid Bookshop is pleased to announce a poetry reading and book signing with Terri Witek on Saturday, May 12, 2012, at 6:30 pm.
A revolutionary fusion of poetry for the ear as well as the eye, Exit Island combines myth with typography in a mélange of images and new forms. Centered on the dancing figure of Ariadne, the love affair at the heart of this transformative account refashions art into an astonishing sequence at once profound, ludic, and transcendently vital.
A sequence of photographs by renowned artist Cyriaco Lopes follows Terri Witek’s poems and, in restrained and powerful visual complementarity, compliments their dramatic force.
Terri Witek is the author of Exit Island (2012), The Shipwreck Dress (2008), Carnal World ( 2006), Fools and Crows (2003), Courting Couples (Winner of the 2000 Center for Book Arts Prize), and Robert Lowell and LIFE STUDIES: Revising the Self (1993), as well as lyric and literary essays about poetry and art . Her projects with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes include works on paper, video, and site-specific installation and have been featured at Art in Odd Places (Big Bronze Statues was chosen as one of the highlights of the 2009 season by Time Out New York), solo shows, and festivals. The first retrospective of their work to date, but here all dreams equal distance, was shown at Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery ; a site-specific project in St. Augustine, Florida, A Shelter on King’s Road, placed the trace of Martin Luther King’s firebombed cottage within the historic Markland House. Currently they are constructing the third round of a poetic game called Uma Coisa N’Outra. Witek teaches at Stetson University, where she holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing.
PRAISE FOR TERRI WITEK’S EXIT ISLAND:
Exit Island is a Blue Plato Special that seek to remake nothing less than the language. Witek’s work (but really play) taps Whitman sexed with Carson, unleashing multi-vocal, -tongued, -genred and just plain multi-poetry in extremis: word bubble, snake work, doll clothes, with a tender ear and a wildness metaphysical, and physical. —Terese Svoboda
