Comics As Poetry

Poetry comics by Kimball Anderson, Derik Badman, Warren Craghead, Julie Delporte, Oliver East, Franklin Einspruch, Jason Overby, and Paul Tunis. Foreword by William Corbett.

Beautiful mutants, vagabond scuba divers, lovers with disordered gorilla hearts: These poetry comics place the lyric and the grotesque, the elegant and the despondent, side by side in one emotionally intense panel after another. At the vanguard of a movement that embraces our increasingly visual culture and believes poetry has an essential place therein, Bianca Stone redefines how we think about poetry, what we expect from comics, and how we interpret our own lives. Although reminiscent of illuminations by William Blake, Thomas Phillips's A Humument, and more recent visual-poetic hybrids by Mary Ruefle and Matthea Harvey, Stone's comics feature a mixture of dreamy expression and absurdist wit that is entirely her own. Her watercolor panels are filled with anthropomorphic horses and baffled ballerinas that guide the reader through the poet's graphic dreamscape: "I was moving like a monsoon through a forest. I was thinking about where I saw myself in two thousand years... And where I saw myself was a tiny subspace ripple sliding through the corridors with a plastic horse in my hand." This book, its own small universe, erases genre distinctions between the visual and the literary, and offers readers a poetic vision of artistic possibilities.

Poetry isn't just the dusty classical poems we all studied in school. It's sexy, raw, political, edgy, and alive. The first of its kind, EMBODIED marries the unique aspects of poetry with those of sequential art in this contemporary graphic poetry. EMBODIED features new work on the theme of gender, identity, and the body from twenty-one of America's premier, award-winning cis female, trans, non-binary poets and adapts them into sequential art stories drawn, colored, and lettered by top cis female, trans, and non-binary artists. With strong BIPOC and LGBTQ+ representation, this anthology emphasizes inclusivity and the amplification of marginalized identities at a time when those identities are most under siege. A percentage of the proceeds will benefit International Women's Health Coalition.

The much-anticipated debut collection from a celebrated young poet, Someone Else's Wedding Vows marks the arrival of an exciting new voice in American poetry. Someone Else’s Wedding Vows reflects on the different forms of love, which can be both tremendously joyous and devastatingly destructive. The title poem confronts a human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with a strange human hopefulness. In this vein, Stone explores our everyday patterns and customs, and in doing so, exposes them for their complexities. Drawing on the neurological, scientific, psychological, and even supernatural, this collection confronts the difficulties of love and family. Stone rankles with a desire to understand, but the questions she asks are never answered simply. These poems stroll along the abyss, pointing towards the absurdity of our choices. They recede into the imaginative in order to understand and translate the distressing nature of reality. It is a bittersweet question this book raises: Why we are like this? There is no easy answer. So while we look down at our hands, perplexed, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows raises a glass to the future.

Part journal, part sketchbook, and wholly original, here is a window into the life and art of one of America's most treasured poets and teachers. The Art of the Possible: Comics Mostly without Pictures is infused with the same energetic wordplay, humor, and tenderness as the best of Kenneth Koch's poems, and illustrated and lettered in his own hand, studded with visual puns and jokes, peopled with recognizable characters from the worlds of arts and letters. Recurring themes and serial comics include: the Brer Comics, starring Brer Fox and his love interest Ella; the Virgil Thompson comics, set in the Chelsea Hotel and featuring Aaron Copland, John Cage, Lillian Hellman, Twiggy, Miles Davis, and other fab figures of the milieu; the Autobiography Comics, which tell of the birth of Koch's daughter Angela; the Artist in his Studio Comics; and the Dead White Man Comics. In the final comic in collection, "Global Charming," Koch writes: "A phenomenon is isolated called 'Global Charming.' Here's what it means: Life on earth becomes more and more delightful," and The Art of the Possible is our best evidence of that assertion.

An autobiographical account of twin boys growing up in a small town in Missouri.