Description
Sonic and typographic experimentation collide in this book-length poem in seven sections. MOTHER IS A BODY is a visceral and immediate exploration of the female body, and that which is continually forced upon it, as Herrera considers what it means to be mothered, and to mother in return.
Through a cyclical process of imagining, conceiving, assigning, emptying, MOTHER IS A BODY at once renounces and reveres the notion of the sacred feminine, to illustrate “mother” in her many actualities — a complex figure, at times unsightly, that both is and isn’t what we most often ascribe to her as an archetype of the divine.
Overseen by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Clarice Lispector, Miriam Medrez, and Yoko Ono, Herrera pieces together material excavated from within Instagram’s endless scroll, Wikipedia’s citations, and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s archives to create a layered inscription — musically, emotionally, philosophically — to the idea of motherhood, and the children she never had.
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Art. Music.
Author Bio
Brandi Katherine Herrera is an artist. Her work in text, image, and sound explores the poetics of color, and space. She is the author of Mutterfarbe (Broken Cloud Press, 2016), a limited-edition artist book of color theory, experimental translation, photography, and poems using Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre as a primary source; and Naturlicher (Broken Cloud Press, 2016), a chapbook of color theory, experimental translation, and poems; a co-author of MAR, a collaborative artist book + limited-edition chapbook of photography, marrings, and poems (Lute & Cleat, 2018); and co-editor of The Lake Rises, a Witness Post Series anthology of poems (Stockport Flats, 2013).
Her work is held in the Seattle Art Museum's Dorothy Stimson Bullitt Library collection, Yale University's Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color, UCLA's Louise M. Darling Library, University at Buffalo's Poetry Collection, and Reed College's Special Collections & Archives, and has been featured in a number of solo + collaborative exhibitions and performance series for the Seattle Art Museum, Cube Gallery, 23 Sandy Gallery, Creative Mornings, Poetry Press Week, and Pure Surface, and published in The Volta, Octopus Magazine, The Common, Poor Claudia, Thru Magazine, and Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, among others.
Author City: PORTLAND, OR USA