WENDY WALKER

"Wendy Walker composes a voluminous, magnificent artists' book incorporating found text, visual elements, and gatefold pages, in which voluminous research gives way, piece by piece, to a taut formal poem, in which is compressed the saga of Constance Kent. The poem comprises one word from each line of Joseph Stapleton’s book The Great Crime of 1860. This poem appears in sequence on the verso pages. On the recto page opposite, passages from various source texts appear, chosen to have the same number of lines as the corresponding passages from the poem do words. In this manner research is translated into a crisp, angular, paratactic poem, which, in turn, becomes a filter for the research. This process subverts history's feigned innocent objectivity by subordinating its documents to the poetic."—William Gillespie

Excerpts from BLUE FIRE have appeared in Marginalia, Projected Letters, the New Review of Literature, the Green Integer Review and The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing.