Description
Poetry. In the de-stabilized intersection of fashion, the war on terror, and cultural constructions of the feminine, GAZE explores the resulting tensions in a series of dichotomies central to an increasingly isolate and adversarial condition: Christianity/Islam, ancient/modern, sacred/secular, sexuality/spirituality, feminism/fundamentalism, power/resistance, self/other.
"In these moments the world is given breath, heat, and voice. All at once it approaches, and the beloved's unfettered body is revealed as the antidote to tyranny." What we see and what we fail to see are constantly juxtaposed, exposing a flawed desire to "become."—Rikki Ducornet
"'Too beautiful to articulate'—dressed, undressed, terrorized, and entrancing. These unveilings, these poems, how they haunt me. Riding Angela Carter on a poetry-horse, Reed hallucinates language with certain and dissolving rhythm. GAZE at them; go blind inside this mentalist's mind. Marthe Reed is unrelenting, unrelentingly kind."—Kate Bernheimer
Author Bio
Marthe Reed authored seven books of poetry: DEPOSITION | DISPOSESSION: CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE SUNDARBANS (Kelsey Street Press, 2021), Ark Hive (The Operating System, 2018), Nights Reading (Lavender Ink, 2014), Pleth (Unlikely Books, 2013) with j/j hastain, (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books, 2013), GAZE (Black Radish Books, 2010), and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink, 2007). She also co- edited, with Linda Russo, Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing in the Anthropocene, an anthology of essays and poetry, from Wesleyan University Press (2018). Reed received a BA from the University of California, San Diego; an MFA from Brown University; and a PhD from the University of Western Australia. She was an assistant professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette before becoming a humanities faculty fellow at Syracuse University in New York. She was also the co-publisher and managing editor of Black Radish Books. She died on April 10, 2018.
Author City: LAFAYETTE, LA USA