“Darn shifts form in extraordinary ways like the unpredictable stitching of dragonflies in air. Here mending calls forth the torn or in turn tears holes in surface narrative. Bios is written as multidimensional fabric – the woof/warp of time/space. Visual images, cross-stitched lines, enact the gears and wheels of DNA which is not only personal but courses through history and current news to counter-spin evolution, to unravel Manifest Destiny, ‘to unwalk the West / to damn Bierstadt’s flaming emigrant sky.’ Here also Anderson Moseman re-invents “the oscillating frame (1953)” between text and image as a kinetic-poetic that fully embodies its activism: “if we mend the hole in the ozone/ not/ with a robot/ handheld remote/ but the low tones from our throats” This work meets despair with repair, there is nothing easy about it except the joy of meeting its “keener listening.” – Meredith Stricker
To order copies, see Delete Press.
“I’m fascinated by American poet Lori Anderson Moseman’s assemblage of text and image, the poetry collection DARN (Delete press, 2021). DARN is composed as a gathering of sentences, phrases and images patched and stitched and sewn together into a kind of lyric quilt. There are elements here reminiscent of the work of Kemptville, Ontario poet Chris Turnbull, utilizing a blend of photograph and text, although Turnbull’s work is more of a 3-D whole that includes text, whereas Moseman works very much in the lyric mode, utilizing fragment and photograph, as well as text, as structural elements of her lyric framework. I am reminded, instead, of some of the visual stitchwork of Erín Moure, photographs of stitched pages, elements of Toronto poet Kate Siklosi’s visual poems, or even the collage-effects of the poems of Susan Howe, the image of one line layering atop another. Moseman’s work also includes echoes of Perth, Ontario Phil Hall’s work, attuned to the precision of the physical lyric and the physical object, offering a particular reverence, with each object and phrase resonating off each other.” – rob mclennnan
For the full review see, mclennan’s blog for March 25,2022