C.R. Grimmer's poetry chapbook O—(ezekiel's wife) as an AUDIO BOOK with poems accompanied by digital soundscapes by sound artist Judy Twedt and featuring artwork by Colleen Burner.
O’s (they/them or she/her) story comes out of a network. Their smallest start branches out of a series in The Lyme Letters that sort through nonbinary, queer, crip, and femme experiences in Biblical master narratives across Judeo-Christian texts. First and foremost, then, this start comes out of the unnamed, “marked ungrievable” spouse of the prophet Ezekiel, who inspired the character O.
Audio recordings of these poems, read by the author C.R. Grimmer, are accompanied by digital soundscapes by sound artist Judy Twedt. The auditory tapestries, inspired by each poem, use recorded, synthesized, and algorithmically generated sounds -- both recognizable and not -- interwoven to evoke image, place, and movement. The sounds play with the spoken word, at times with mimicry and reflection, at times with repetition or cacophony, in the contestation of she/they who was/is unnamed
A shape after a shape is a shape after a shape. Hewn Fruit is a series of spontaneous compositions that play with how a repeated flat shape can show facets, dimension, depth, and space. The repetition initially was an attempt to exorcise anxiety and fixation, a sort of stand-in for recurring thoughts that could be piled up within the bounds of a page and shift back and forth between a united object and a more diffuse mass. The shape in question is nothing in particular, a bit of roundness rising up or stacking behind, clutching like eggs or pulled down into peaks like soft mud. Or perhaps they are dark and open mouths, bearing the sounds of "O."
C.R. GRIMMER (she/her or they/them) is a poet, scholar, and lecturer at the UW in Seattle with an MFA, MA, and PhD. They host and produce The Poetry Vlog (TPV). Supported through an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship and Jack Straw Artist Support Fellowship, TPV is a social justice YouTube channel and podcast dedicated to building queer and anti-racist coalitions through poetry, higher education, pop culture, and related arts dialogues. C.'s own poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of journals, from POETRY and [PANK] to FENCE and Drunken Boat. Scholarship on contemporary queer and race theory can be found in journals such as The Comparatist. The Harlan Hahn Disability Studies Fellowship partially funded the completion of their manuscript, The Lyme Letters, which has been a finalist with presses such as Alice James Books. crgrimmer.com
JUDY TWEDT (she/her) is a digital sound artist working primarily on auditory representations of climate data. She has a masters degree in Atmospheric Sciences and is a PhD Candidate in climate communication at the University of Washington. A National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, her climate soundtracks have been aired on NPR, PBS, Canadian Public Broadcasting, podcasts, NOAA’s Science on a Sphere, and live for TEDx Seattle. She is a fifth-generation settler on Coast Salish land and a University of Washington instructor in climate writing and sustainability studies. More information at www.judytwedt.com.
COLLEEN BURNER is an artist and writer living in Portland, Or. They are a co-editor of Shirley Magazine and an Oregon Literary Arts fellowship recipient. Their work has been published in Quaint, Permafrost, Entropy, Old Pal Magazine, and elsewhere.