Robot, Girl
Kristine Snodgrass's first full-length solo poetry collection reads like a feminist thriller (third-wave, of course) or a terrifying sci-fi glimpse of our American future (or present!), complete with lady robots, stellar journeys, irrational fling-flang, and language yanked so alarmingly it fractals into repetitive codes, cyphers, and brash exclamation points. It's both nightmare and portal. Girl and girl noir. It's quirky, entertaining, obsessive, and scanning for trouble: one poet's vision you're too stunned to look away from.
-Maureen Seaton
Rank
There is a journey between the source image and the target image in the glitch. From the surface to the bottom. From what is rationally structured to what is its original code. In Rank, Kristine Snodgrass places side-by-side visual works and poetic writings that share the same root: a subversive intention with respect to the abused and crystallized languages of everyday communication and power, in search of what is subterranean, corporeal, germinal. "Syllables of mortal flesh," she writes. A gesture - in images and words - almost physical and performative, which demystifies the apparent and reveals the substantial. An act, which becomes aesthetic, of deconstruction and re-creation through the "error" caused in the image file on the one hand and in the structure of the written text on the other. The result, on the visual side, is different works in which the signification is entrusted to the constituent elements of color (phosphorescent and iridescent or transparent with suggestions of watercolor, inked and scratched or pasty, intensely sampled in the drafting of blacks and blues or fiery red), of the line (vertical, horizontal, or intertwined), of the sign (thick as erasures or minute as germinations, with words or syllables as resistance to slipping), of the composition (orthogonal, or specular, geometrically full-bodied or extremely fragmented). On the writing side, the "error," consisting of the vital and magmatic automatism of the flow of consciousness, deconstructs the language of rational communication, producing texts in which the different levels of experience collide, provoking sparks meaning, flashes, and illuminations. On both sides, closely connected, the heuristic encounter between author and user in search of a possible lost communication takes place. The error, the glitch (with what it implies of chance and chaos), the imperfection, forcefully brings back the uncontrolled complexity of life into the artificial simplification of the constituted order, that singular unrepeatable uniqueness capable of producing its own "native sound": "The ensuing light is a spirit departed from blood."
-Cinzia Farina
Out of the World
What makes "Out of the World" extraordinary is Snodgrass' relentless pursuit of play in the theater of her own fantastically absurd universe. Fierce and fluorescent, her poetry pierces as it lures and lulls the reader into bliss. It doesn't wobble or stagnate. Doesn't wait to be heard. When you open this book, sit with a plate of dinner rolls. Be thankful for the Appalachian foothills and dogs in space. For the wrens and language that is full of bones.
—Neil de la Flor Author of Almost Dorothy
Two Thieves & a Liar
Storming the genders of Americanismo with crossed fingers and sans rules, these poems contradict the text by adding values and filling out applications. Two voices and three voices are threaded to one and the resulting operatic tool digs up the shades of birds, mathematics, riots, and catastrophe. Experience a disturbing disintegration of authorial identity. Experience that identity reshape and reassemble as an intelligent chimera that stares you in the face with as many faces as you can imagine.
— Natalija Grgorinic & Ognjen Raden
When I interviewed these three authors about how they "did" it, that is to say, collaborate, it wasn't like I received three sets of answers. Group mind groped, it was like talking to the tank.
— Terese Svoboda
Cover art: Pamela Callahan, “West Nile Kid.” (Courtesy of the artist and Woman Made Gallery, Chicago