Creative Thresholds

By Nicholas Quin Serenati

Humanscapes is the final post in a three-part series, which began with Locating Place: Fragments of an Illness.

About the series: Illness experience is a resource for experiential knowledge. To that extent, it is important to understand that life has infinite spaces which can be experienced. My work is concerned with phenomenological experiences that transform these spaces into places. These places become the foundations in our individual lives – the construct of our identity. The work in this series is intended to ascertain an understanding of the ways meaning–making functions as a method for healing, and how the creative process operates to uncover and identify new metaphors that best communicate illness experience to others.

HUMANSCAPES

In Bob Trowbridge’s book, The Hidden Meaning of Illness: Disease as a Symbol and Metaphor, a philosophical engagement is established with how illness penetrates the process of being human. What illness does for a person is quite unique and individualized. For me, I find that illness is an experience that can stifle and complicate the order of living. However, I believe that illness experience offers an opportunity to transcend the basic containment of being ill and evolve into a more knowledgeable and inspired being. Similar to the process of art making, illness is a process of discovery. During illness experience, an opportunity arises to untether from the superficialities that compound life and embrace the moments of being vulnerable, confused and weak in order to flourish in strength, beauty and wisdom.

Humanscapes presents an extremely straightforward and customary point of view on illness. The work embodies the typical tone and nature that possesses aggression and horror. Humanscapes is an exploration of the human condition as I perceive it to be through my illness experience. Specifically, the exploration dealt with juxtaposition of content – image and poetry – and in doing so, the overarching philosophical questions emerges: what would resonate?

Collected Spaces

Pathosis.

Death comes during the twilight.
An opera of suffocating screams,
tuned in the key of pain.
Pitch perfect, echoing across barren landscapes.
Injections, ravenous poison, constricting veins.
Internal asphyxiation.

A lifeless marionette standing on a thorn’s edge of a cacti.
Sand storms perform a ritual dance
to a fiddling devil, vultures circle above.
Breath shallows, eyes hollow, heart slows, flesh blisters.
Red-eyed from hearing my mother’s cry.
Tears from angels come crashing down, loud.
Collected by the hands of a decomposing crowd.
Now, we can bathe, and be covered in a linen shroud.

Traces of red from these fingertips,
Ink that flows and pens this script.
What is left are bloodstains,
from life’s dismissed.
I’d be remiss, if a history of illness went claimless.
Anabiosis.

Timberland

I tasted illness.

Flavored by metallic bitterness of wicked misery,
It sped through my veins.
A devouring plague,
An internal decomposition;
The memory hangs in the timberland of my mind.
Silent, static, yet ever present.

Matches

I sympathize with those who lie still.
The light has escaped them;
and now, darkness.

I find it eerily near.
Stillness.
Vulnerability that will always remain.

In the shadows,
just as ugly.
Dark separation is home.

Shadows misplaced,
Lying dormant with others.

Windows

Overshadowed by internments of negative space,
Reflection blinds the wonder of escape.

A room,
Void of definition, exists little to name.
Balanced by masses,
Whispers of nothingness fall short of noise.

Beneath an image is the image.
Transcending the real for a rendering of another;
The antagonistic image that requires such attention.

Light, the consciousness of wisdom;
Darkness, its frame

The Old Oak House

A splintering in the wood on the side of this old oak house reminds me of that winter.

Crackling echoes through the chilled air from slivers separating.

This old oak house is in ruins, decaying inside out.

I stand by the window looking out.

My fingers run across the weathered wood interior,

Pieces of the old oak break away and fall around my feet.

That morning, trees stood still, birds frozen in flight.

Water ran down the grooves of the rusted metal roof, down the pane of glass

Like rain, dropping down upon my forehead.

The old oak house dampened.

The crackling grew louder.

Light from the sun turned away and darkness loomed.

Near the old oak house, a river cut through the land like a knife.

Steam from the water smothered a rolling landscape,

A scorching water flow.

Condensation ran down trunks of trees, off tips of leaves, down the plank wood siding

of the old oak house.

Soaked was the landscape.

Just beyond the old oak house, past the riverbank, into the distance, a forest.

From the thicket of brush and pine, a dark horse emerged.

Massive and stoic it stood, flaring its nostrils, sensing the frigid still air.

Black, lifeless eyes peered in the direction of the old oak house.

With a gait slow and steady, the dark horse neared.

I moved aside of the window, peering out carefully

Fear lumped in my throat as his presence grew broader.

The dark horse approached the edge of the riverbank.

Blood trickled from his fractured hooves into the water.

The red streamed down current.

I gasped from inside that old oak house; the dark horse stared.

That is where we remained.

Nicholas Quin Serenati is an interdisciplinary scholar-artist whose work is defined by arts-based research that explores the potential of medium and discipline in liminal spaces. With a practice rooted in locating one’s place, Serenati employs video, creative writing, photography, sound, installation and performance to investigate forming situations that direct his research around illness and metaphor.

Serenati’s intellectual practice deeply engages the creation of meaning – form and function – and the articulation of story throughout the investigative process. Themes of trauma, identity, illness, disability, experimental narrative, social constructivism, sound and language are all contributing factors to Serenati’s work as a critical discourse. Serenati’s scholarly-art practice is intended to investigate phenomena as a way of achieving profound knowledge of theory, philosophy and art.

Based out of St. Augustine, Florida, Serenati holds a BA in Communications from Flagler College, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College, and is a candidate for his Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies: Humanities and Culture from Union Institute & University. He is currently the Art Director / Dept. Chair of the Cinematic Arts program at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts and an adjunct professor of media and cinema studies at Flagler College.

Serenati’s dissertation, ReFraming Leukemia: Metaphorizing Illness as Windows, will be completed May 2014, and the installation of the project is set for early 2015 in St. Augustine, Florida.

Twitter: @nqserenati
Website: nqserenati.com

by Christopher Hutchinson

http://www.nndb.com/people/227/000093945/winckelmann-1-sized.jpg

http://andberlin.com/2012/07/02/deutsches-historisches-museum-german-historical-museum/

To Winckelmann, the art of Rome was an afterthought. The pinnacle of ancient art had been achieved in fifth-century Athens, whose democracy was the root cause of her excellence. The decline of art began with the establishment of the Hellenistic kingdoms following the death of Alexander. The moral lesson to be drawn from ancient history was not the danger of pagan hubris but rather the superiority of democracy.

http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/exhibits/antiquity/education3.htm

Art & Supremacy

From its inception art history has been tied to Supremacy.  Johann Winckelmann, author of the first History of Ancient Art 1764, whose sentiments are stated above, set the rubric as to what could and should be considered art. Many assume that art history has always been in existence. Truthfully it officially begins with Winckelmann and Neoclassical thought.  True to Neoclassical thought, there can be only one way to achieve art, and is through Democracy.

This democracy has been one of the major reasons why Greece has become the go-to standard as the beginning of art praxis.  This allows a global nullification of art produced by second and third world countries.  Winckelmann’s democracy becomes synonymous with supremacy.

It is completely logical that the art of the Third Reich would adopt the standard of supremacy set by Winckelmann. Even the rebirth of humanism laid in the Renaissance and art movements that follow after, have a conceptual tie to that superiority that cannot be overlooked.  The linear practice of Western art theory/methodology has these roots. Hitler was aware of this obvious relationship.  His crowning achievement, after dominating the world, was to be his Museum of Art.

The museum was to have occupied the majority of the city center of Linz, turning the working-class town into Vienna’s cultural superior, a concept that Hitler had relished ever since his failed attempt to become an art student in Vienna, a city that made him feel like a rejected, second-class citizen, prior to his political career  

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/07/inside-hitler-s-fantasy-museum.html

Art & Propaganda

pro·pa·gan·da

: ideas or statements that are often false or exaggerated and that are spread in order to help a cause, a political leader, a government, etc.

1capitalized :  a congregation of the Roman curia having jurisdiction over missionary territories and related institutions

2:  the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person

3:  ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause; also :  a public action having such an effect

The Ziegler painting installed above the mantle of Hitler’s apartment. The Judgement of Paris by Ziegler
http://www.berkshirefinearts.com/uploadedImages/articles/2074_Guggenheim785848.jpg

http://www.chinaoilpaintinggallery.com/oilpainting/Peter-Paul-Rubens/The-Judgment-of-Paris-3.jpg

Art of the Third Reich has often been linked with the term propaganda as something negative.  Propaganda is usually perceived as the binary opposite to democracy. This would be the traditional understanding, except for the seamless transition Hitler’s propaganda and the history art already present.  Ziegler’s direct appropriation of Ruben’s Judgement of Paris 1636 is a testament to the farce of democracy. How could this be propaganda, when this narrative was already present?

Christopher Hutchinson is an Assistant Professor of Art at Atlanta Metropolitan State College, Archetype Art Gallery Owner in Atlanta, Ga, and Smoke School of Art Founder. He received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from Savannah College of art & Design, Atlanta and his Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama. He lived in Alabama for 10 years before moving to Atlanta in 2008.

Learn more about Christopher and his work at Black Flight 144.

by Daniel Boscaljon

“the tomorrow after world’s end” is the eighth letter in a series of posts called Letters to You written by Daniel Boscaljon with images by Melissa D. Johnston (from one of her ongoing projects). Letters to You began in July with “everytime i write i feel myself disintegrate.”

your tears were reluctant to fall, but the way that your body trembled announced to me that the world was about to end.  i held you in my arms, a tight embrace, hoping that you could jolt me to your state, so that i could share in it with you.  but my arms did nothing: weak, lifeless, they simply encircled you adding neither strength nor comfort.  your words came forth: they were not indictments of me, the messenger.  i know that you understood the situation fully.  you know that i, too, sense that the end of the world is beginning to dawn and that we see the red sky brimming as a token of doom.  the difference lies not in what we see, but how we react.  i am envious of your tears and trembles, for the sight does nothing for me but create a numbed sense of cold death.  tears, at least, express something.  my weak arms and straight face do nothing but stare straight ahead.

of course, the tragedy lies not in the world’s end but precisely within its failure to do so.  were it truly to end, tonight, i feel we could both (with joy) embrace each other and accept annihilation.  it would be a moment of relaxation where we could reflect on the past–leading up to today. it would not be hypocritical to overlook the moments of torments and tragedies.  the world should end with a bang, not a whimper, after all.  so we would light the fireworks we never saw when the world was young, and lay on a blanket under the moon and have bread and cheese and wine.  at the last moments, we could hold onto each other, and with one last kiss yield our bodies and lives to the horizon of annihilation.  …if only the world were ending.

instead, we’re left with the taste of a world which stubbornly persists beyond its ending.  having tasted and accepted the end, there is nothing worse than the arrival of a new tomorrow.  embarrassed, the empty wine bottle reveals the futility of last night’s celebration.  insects and rodents enjoy our bread despite the fact that it has hardened–but even they ignore the cheese.  tomorrow forces itself upon us with an unrelenting presence.

when you had begun to cry, i had thought your tears were an act of mourning the failures of the past.  when you continued to cry, i interpreted them as betokening the futility of fighting fate. now, i think, i understand that you understood the true nature of the tragedy from the beginning.

there is nothing worse than being forced to accept a series of tomorrows without a future.  there is nothing emptier than time without hope, when duration and repetition are indistinguishable.  Emptiness arrives when one is given the form of a day and is simultaneously forbidden to fill it with any sort of content.  The future spreads itself as a numb, blank, empty, dumb canvas and its blankness is an expression of our soul.

had the world ended last night, i could have rested in the fulfillment of joy.   instead, i merely endure through time.

Daniel Boscaljon has Ph.D.s in Modern Religious Thought and 19th-century American Literature, both from the University of Iowa. His interest is in the fragility and liminality of human experiences. His first book, Vigilant Faith: Passionate Agnosticism in the Secular World was published by the University of Virginia Press this past August.

by Christopher Hutchinson

Raymond Saunders
http://www.wirtzgallery.com/bios/bio_saunders.html

Black abstraction is often overlooked in art history. Black art is a term that is used to classify the artwork of image and subject based exclusively for the Black community. Any work outside of the stereotype lives in a limbo state that would typically be designated for Western Academia. Black abstraction is almost an oxymoron, due to the fact that Black art is largely associated with outsider, primitive, and folk art. Examining this relationship between Raymond Saunders and Jean-Michel Basquiat is to draw a linear history of Art that proves a transcendence of Black art to being more than stereotypical images.

When one does an Internet search for Saunders, names like Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, or Cy Twombly come up. Likewise with Basquiat names like Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Warhol. The two almost never intertwine yet their work is so similar. It is my hypothesis that the obvious link between the two is their Black art lineage. It is in their interest in documenting history and challenging the prohibition on black in traditional painting, the physicality of Blackness through black paint, all the while coding it in Black language.

Prohibition on black paint

Gray is toneless and immobile. This immobility, however, is of a different character from the tranquillity of green, which is the product of two active colors and lies midway between them. Gray is therefore the disconsolate lack of motion. The deeper this gray becomes, the more the disconsolate element is emphasized, until it becomes suffocating.
Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit12-19-02.asp

The term Black is a color is a direct response to any painter who has endured a traditional oil painting class. The professors of these classes create rules for students that forbid the use of buying or using black paint at anytime during the course. Students are to mix their own blacks. You must learn the ways of the Italian oil painting masters. Painters who paint from life know that there is no real black in nature. So to a true oil painter any amount of pure black is an offence. Black paint is not a shadow, it is a warm color that comes to the front and does not recede. Black flattens space, or the depth of a painting, everything that the old masters are against. These were the guidelines all the way to a significant shift with Edward Manet. It is very easy to tell artists who paint from life or a photograph. That heightened contrast only exists in photography and artificial lighting, not nature. Undergraduate foundation courses still have these rules as a rubric.

This ban on black paint allows many so-called oil realists, who are also considered brilliant colorists, to fail miserably to capture Black skin. While initially these black paint and Black skin seem to be unrelated, it becomes blatantly obvious when it is painted. This can easily be seen in the works of Elizabeth Peyton. She is known for painting these androgynous icons but her depiction of the first Lady and daughter is proof of the European painters lack of skill in understanding black paint and Black skin, then further Black people.

Elizabeth Peyton
Democrats are more beautiful (after Jonathan Horowitz), 2001
Oil on board
25,4 x 20,3 cm
Collection Laura & Stafford Broumand
http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/elizabeth-peyton/

Elzabeth Peyton
“Michelle and Sasha Obama Listening to Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention, August 2008”
http://artandperception.com/2009/01/obama-and-the-arts.html

The prohibition of black paint is transfixed to Black imagery and the spectacle of the Black body. It is within this prohibition that Raymond Saunders practice begins to identify the semiotics of black the color and Black imagery.

black
1. lacking hue and brightness; absorbing light without reflecting any of the rays composing it. 2. characterized by absence of light; enveloped in darkness: a black night.
3. ( sometimes initial capital letter ) a. pertaining or belonging to any of the various populations characterized by dark skin pigmentation, specifically the dark-skinned peoples of Africa, Oceania, and Australia. b. African American. 4. soiled or stained with dirt: That shirt was black within an hour. 5. gloomy; pessimistic; dismal: a black outlook.
6. deliberately; harmful; inexcusable: a black lie. 7. boding ill; sullen or hostile; threatening: black words; black looks. 9. without any moral quality or goodness; evil; wicked: His black heart has concocted yet another black deed. 10. indicating censure, disgrace, or liability to punishment: a black mark on one’s record. 11. marked by disaster or misfortune: black areas of drought; Black Friday. 13. based on the grotesque, morbid, or unpleasant aspects of life: black comedy; black humor. 14. (of a check mark, flag, etc.) done or written in black to indicate, as on a list, that which is undesirable, substandard, potentially dangerous, etc.: Pilots put a black flag next to the ten most dangerous airports. 17. deliberately false or intentionally misleading: black propaganda. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/black

Black is a Color pamphlet

Saunders has also published catalogs and pamphlets; most notably, his 1967 pamphlet “Black is a Color”, which argues that African American artists need not be limited by racial representations, and argues against the concept of “black” art as a potentially degrading restriction, in favor of a more race-neutral approach to artistic creation. https://www.cca.edu/academics/faculty/rsaunders

Artist and Professor Raymond Saunders wrote his pamphlet “Black is a Color” in 1967 after attaining his MFA from California College of Arts in 1961. Black is a Color takes issue with the Black Art of present in the 60’s and is still more so relevant today. Saunders sees the spectacle of the black body as something extremely limiting to African American contribution to the Arts. Saunders recognizes the need for abstraction as a tool to challenge the narrative of black so coded in the long history of the painted image.

“Racial hang-ups are extraneous to art. no artist can afford to let them obscure what runs through all art–the living root and the ever-growing aesthetic record of human spiritual and intellectual experience. can’t we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end?” [sic]
–Raymond Saunders, African-American artist, in his 1967 pamphlet Black is a Color http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug01/westkaemper/callaloo/gallery6.html

Black Abstraction

abstract art
noun
an abstract genre of art; artistic content depends on internal form rather than pictorial representation [syn: abstractionism]

A trend in painting and sculpture in the twentieth century. Abstract art seeks to break away from traditional representation of physical objects. It explores the relationships of forms and colors, whereas more traditional art represents the world in recognizable images.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/abstract%20art?&o=100074&s=t

Raymond Saunders,  “Jack Johnson” 1972
http://negroartist.com/Black%20Art%20and%20Culture%20in%20the%2020th%20Century.jpg

20th-century black art  is the first to concentrate on the art works themselves, and on how these works, created during a major social upheaval and transformation, use black culture both as subject and as context. Professor Powell traces and explores the visual representations of black culture throughout the 20th century, to racial and cultural identity used as artistic content in the 1980s and 1990s. A conclusion discussing black society and culture in 20th-century film and video, and biographies of the many artists discussed in the book, complete this comprehensive work. http://www.amazon.com/Black-Culture-20th-Century-World/dp/0500202958

Saunders’s  “Jack Johnson” (1972) painting graces the cover of Professor Richard J. Powell’s Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. Powell’s book lists artists from the Diaspora that have contributed to a contemporary art dialogue while discussing its context. There is a Black lineage of artists that goes beyond Romare Bearden. There is a lineage of Black abstraction.

Saunders does not use abstraction as a way to hide his ethnicity, rather to explore the physical qualities of black as it relates to Blackness. Many have used abstraction in ways to avoid ethnicity completely. The use of black in Black abstraction is also shared with Jack Whitten in his Dead Reckoning  1  1980.

Jack Whitten, Dead Reckoning 1, 1980
http://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/111/flashcards/39111/png/screen_shot_2013-12-04_at_114146_pm-142C119C2F63372524B.png

Basquiat’s Radiant predecessor

Jean-Michel Basquiat
. http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/jean-michel-basquiat/film.html

Centered on a rare interview that director and friend Tamra Davis shot with Jean-Michel Basquiat more than 20 years ago, this film chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of the young artist. In the crime-ridden New York City of the 1970s, he covers the city with the graffiti tag ‘SAMO.’ In 1981 he puts paint on canvas for the first time, and by 1983 he is an artist with “rock star status.” He achieves critical and commercial success, though he is constantly confronted by racism from his peers. In 1985, he and Andy Warhol become close friends and painting collaborators, but they part ways and Warhol dies suddenly in 1987. Basquiat’s heroin addiction worsens, and he dies of an overdose in 1988 at the age of 27. The artist was 25 years old at the height of his career, and today his canvases sell for more than a million dollars. http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/jean-michel-basquiat/film.html

Tamara Davis’s documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child is the best documentary about the Afro-Puerto Rican, Haitian-American, and New York native Basquait there is. Davis filled the scholarly interviews that provided a feel of a real understanding of Basquait’s methodology and process. As all-encompassing as this documentary was, the lineage of Black abstraction was again overlooked. No mention of Saunders, Whitten, Chase-Riboud allows for a Western discovery narrative of the radiant child, a child born and nurtured with no influence of Black. An unknown phenomenon plucked out as worthy. Even the depiction of him listening to Jazz as he painted reminds us of the Pollock process being the same. This Western Adoption of Basquiat has every bit to do with the fact that Basquiat himself does not mention the Black lineage of Abstraction, but one look at Saunders’s mark-making, image and text, collaboration, chalk and found object doors, and it easy to see that whatever praise is lauded unto Basquiat it due to the utter appropriation of his predecessors, specifically Raymond Saunders.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was so heavily influenced by Saunders that he adapted several of the artist’s motifs into his own paintings. Some of these, like his dedications to famous jazz musicians and a king’s crown drawn in white chalk, appear prominently in the new work. Taken as a whole, the exhibits’ swirls of color over full black grounds resemble galaxies and suggest movement, perhaps influenced by his years of traveling and working abroad. http://www.boothism.org/2007/09/28/open-to-interpretationraymond-suanders-just-paints/

These two are both great artists and are both responsible for the limited scope of Black art which is still largely viewed as folk. Not acknowledging the past and allowing the Western canon to “discover” you is a problem. It negates the possibility of that culture to stand on its own aesthetics and moral. Not acknowledging reinforces the very advances that great artists like these make.

Raymond Saunders Celeste Age 5 Invited me to Tea 1986
http://negroartist.com/negro%20artist/Raymond%20Saunders/images/Raymond%20saunders%20Celeste%20Age%205%20Invited%20Me%20To%20Tea,%201986_jpg.jpg

Jean Michel-Basquiat notary 1983
http://uploads7.wikipaintings.org/images/jean-michel-basquiat/notary.jpg!Large.jpg

Raymond Saunders
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mSE5ZwhY3cA/UpQnzPXwwGI/AAAAAAAABKk/w-vPZHOguiU/s1600/fc1bde7eb465d537beb736673078f3f3%5B1%5D.jpg

Christopher Hutchinson is an Assistant Professor of Art at Atlanta Metropolitan State College and Archetype Art Gallery Owner in Atlanta, Ga. He received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from Savannah College of art & Design, Atlanta and his Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama. He lived in Alabama for 10 years before moving to Atlanta in 2008.
Learn more about Christopher and his work at Black Flight 144.

By Nicole J. Johns
Image by Caroline Nevin

Queen of the Grotto by Caroline Nevin https://www.facebook.com/CINfulART

to have lived in this town
is to never trust a bridge again.

we have seen
when bridges fail, like people.

we feel the give and shake
as we sit idling in traffic.

bumper to bumper
so close together, we are.
 
 
gusset plate crumbling
like a thin, rusty communion wafer.

tumbling, braking, crashing,
praying.
 
 
Bridges don’t collapse in America.
 
 
this must be some third world country,
or a terrorist attack.

we know better,
the sonic boom alerted and altered.

we sit disconnected, staring
at taillights and that murky water.

wondering, knowing, our river
is full of secrets.

and we are merely suspended–
above
 

Liminal

find the dark space—
crawl inside

iniquity.

we go down,
together. into

liminal space
language, no one

has ever written—
or spoken.

language is born.
language is reborn.

straddle the gap,
quiver along the line

Rush Hour

what does it mean
to tell you this?

to sit static
on the interstate

and think of the place
i used to call home

a time and a space
rolling in memory

the person i was
three lives ago

gone.

all of us
have multiple lives

we are all reborn
of former selves

our old lives
creep in on us

during rush hour
while waiting in line

would you have loved
the person i once was?

Poetry Village

I want to join a poetry village,
where metaphors
Run wild through a dim forest,

A plethora of frenzied poesy,
poems composed by poets,
Strung out on coffee, cigarettes,
gin and tonic, and love.

Verbs race through the air,
knocking into the walls of huts,
Nouns primly sip tea with a poet.

A genre goddess knocks at the door,
bringing with her a custom made muse,
A replica of the woman I fell in love with
over lunches, late nights and dancing.

Erogenous alphabets float
through the atmosphere,
a cacophony of rolling consonants blending.
Redundant entanglements are forbidden.

Nicole J. Johns is originally from rural western Pennsylvania, but now lives in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, where she teaches English at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and her BA in English/Creative Writing from Penn State-Erie, The Behrend College. Her first book, Purge: Rehab Diaries (Seal Press, 2009) was nominated for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award in memoir, and has been described by Library Journal as an “unflinching work rooted in feminist self-reflection.” Nicole has also published poems in numerous literary magazines, including The Evening Street Review, Ellipsis, and Lake Effect.

Check out her Website and her Facebook page or say “hi” on Twitter (@nicolejjohns). You can writer her at nicolejjohns@gmail.com.

by Nicholas Quin Serenati

Reclaiming Experiential Residue: Misconceptions is the second of a three-part series, which began with Locating Place: Fragments of an Illness. The third and final part is Humanscapes.