whittle gristle is less a “chapbook” than a subset of an ongoing poetry “notebook.” From June 15, 2024 to December 8, 2024, I returned again and again to an exhibit, Necroarchivos de las Americas: An Unrelenting Search for Justice, at University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. The works in this archive “document and denounce” violent injustices wielded by global power brokers. See https://jsma.uoregon.edu/art/exhibition/necroarchivos-de-las-americas.
These poems react to artworks by Carlos Castro Arias, Luis Camnitzer, Regina José Galindo, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Teresa Margolles, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Felicia Rice, Jennifer González, Gustavo Cazquez, Doris Salcedo, Valaria Tatera and Voluposa Jarpa. Elaborate conversations emerge, “questioning U.S. intervention in other countries, authoritarian regimes, gender violence and racism.” The complexity of this exhibit is thanks to careful curation by Dr. Adriana Miramontes Olivas. Poems in whittle gristle reverberate also with writings by Jordan Abel, Mourid Barghouti, Christian Bök, Alice Oswald and Daisy Zamora.
This chapbook is available from above/ground press. https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2025/03/new-from-aboveground-press-whittle.html