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Neurons: A Series of erasure poems · Christine Jones
$10.00
A supplement of her book, Now Calls Me Daughter, Christine Jones created erasure poems out of a care-givers manual.
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Explain a little about these erasure poems. How did they come about and where do they fit into your work in general?
To assist my parents, my siblings and I took a six-week Savvy Caregiver’s class online, hosted by the Alzheimer’s Family Support Center. The AFSC is an amazing resource, and the class was helpful, but I found myself “zoomed” out and doodling on the hefty manual we were following. Soon I began creating neuron-like images engulfing words and highlighting others. For many of the poems in the manuscript, I turned to formal poetry to bring structure and a framework to the chaos, but within the erasure poems I found freedom in the experimentation and letting-go of traditional verse, creating new art. I used gouache paint to silhouette neuron-like amorphic figures in contrast to the words that remained and became the poem. Other text I blurred in the background with a watercolor overlay shaped as plaque clusters to create a sense of disruption and discordance, not unlike what we believe is happening to the brain with Alzheimer’s disease. These poems are a significant extension of my book and my poetry, indicative of the imitation and associative resonance between life and art.
About the Author
Christine Jones lives on Cape Cod, with her husband, where you’ll find them swimming and running along its shores. She earned her MFA from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a therapist and mother of two. She’s the author of Girl Without a Shirt (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and co-editor of the anthology, Voices Amidst the Virus: Poets Respond to the Pandemic (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2020). She’s also the founder/editor-in-chief of Poems2go and associate editor of Lily Poetry Review. Her poetry can be found in numerous journals and anthologies in print and online
Copyright © 2022 Clara Eugenia Ronderos
Cover design by d’Entremont
ISBN 978-1-949279-42-9
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.
