Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
The Troubling Sings: an exhibition of Her Read, A Graphic Poem
Opening event September 17, 2022
Doors: 6 PM, Readings: 7 PM
Closes December 2022
Please join us for an evening of art, poetry, and conversation.
The opening event for The Troubling Sings: an exhibition from Her Read, A Graphic Poem will include a poetry reading and discussion on the subject of erasure and mental health featuring celebrated poets Aaron Coleman, Jennifer Metsker, Lauren Russell and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth along with local visual artist, Madison Grosvenor.
On Her Read, A Graphic Poem:
The profound achievement of Jennifer Steinorth’s collage poem is in its scope as well as its internal beauty. “Why do we art?” it asks, and the answer leads us through history, raising what has been quietly, often painfully, subsumed under the traditional story, represented by a particular book, The Meaning of Art, by Herbert Read. Here comes the feminine, the imp, breaking through, or squeezing around, the old story, word by word! The result is less an erasure than a separate art, stitched upon, painted upon, cut into. It is a study in desire and erotic play— amusing, troubling, beautiful, and broken. It sings the pain of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers and celebrates the beauty of mutual love, male and female. Its originality and heart leave me breathless.
~Fleda Brown, author of The Woods Are on Fire: New & Selected Poems
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s award-winning books include A Wake with Nine Shades, Forking the Swift and Her Read, A Graphic Poem, a feminist manifesto of visual poetry and the recipient of the Foreword INDIES bronze prize for poetry. She has received grants from Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Community of Writers, and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her recent work appears in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Plume, Rhino, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. A lecturer in the University of Michigan Department of English and Penny Stamps School of Art and Design, she divides her time between Traverse City and Ann Arbor. Her interdisciplinary approach to language is drawn from years as a classical dancer and a decade in architectural design and construction.
