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Concordance

Concordance

$29.00Price
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Kiki Smith

  • DETAILS

    2006, 42 pages

    ISBN 978-0932716675

     

    DESCRIPTION

    Concordance is a new collaborative work by three acclaimed contemporary artists: poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and sculptor Kiki Smith, working with book artist Anne McKeown. Inspired by Smith's image of a dandelion, whose floating silks she compares to reading, the poem traces agreements and embeddings of human and animal bodies, ideas, dreams, and emotion in a concordance of parallel and contingent contexts. "Then it's possible to undo misunderstanding from inside by tracing the flight or thread of empty space running through things." Then what if, in that bond, "images were Eros as words?" In Smith's etchings, reading, as Eros, is drawn as seeds, feathers, star-like explosions, pods, wide-eyed, unblinking owls. "Animals . . . open their eyes, and a mirror forms on the ground." The effects of the verbal images and gray-blue inked drawings are stunning and other-worldly.

     

    This book is the second Kelsey Street Press collaboration between Berssenbrugge and Smith. The first, Endocrinology, was originally produced in 1998 as a fine art edition by U.L.A.E. and printed in a facsimile edition by Kelsey Street in 2005. Concordance was brought out in an edition of thirty by Anne McKeown of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper in an accordian format.

  • BIOGRAPHY

    Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She received degrees in poetry from Reed College and Columbia University School of the Arts and taught poetry at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her books include Empathy from Station Hill Press and five books from Kelsey Street Press: Sphericity, Endocrinology, Four Year Old Girl, NEST and Concordance, with covers and design by her husband, Richard Tuttle. Among her awards are two National Endowment Fellowships, two Before Columbus National Book Awards and two Asian American Writers’ Workshop Book Awards. I Love Artists: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS was released from the University of California Press in 2006. Her collaborations include Hiddenness with Richard Tuttle published by the Whitney Museum Library Fellows in 1997 and The Lit Cloud with Kiki Smith from Lelong Gallery in 2012. Hello, the Roses, was published by New Directions in 2013. In 2021 Berssenbrugge was named the winner of Yale’s 2021 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. The prize is awarded biennially to an American poet for the best book of poetry in the previous two years or for lifetime achievement. For Berssenbrugge the award recognized her work A Treatise of Stars (New Directions, 2020) and lifetime achievement. Berssenbrugge lives in northern New Mexico and New York City.

     

    Kiki Smith was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and grew up in New Jersey. She has exhibited her work since the 1980s, when she was a member of COLAB, an influential artists' collective in New York City. Her work is represented in museums throughout Europe and the United States. A major retrospective of her prints, PRINTS, BOOKS AND THINGS, took place at the Museum of Modern Art, 2003. In 2006 Walker Art Museum organized a major survey retrospective of her oeuvre, which then traveled to Houston and, finally, to the Whitney Museum in New York. Smith lives and works in New York City.

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