“Selections from Her Read” by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth is a poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist, and licensed builder. The author of Her Read, a graphic poem (2021) and A Wake with Nine Shades (2019), finalist for Foreword Reviews Best of the Indie Press Award, she has received grants from Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior, Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Rhino and elsewhere. Her visual art has appeared at the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago and Oliver Arts Center in Michigan. She teaches writing at Northwestern Michigan College.
Her Read, a graphic poem is a hybrid text at once poetry and visual art. In the tradition of reusing canvases, Steinorth takes a seminal text, The Meaning of Art by Herbert Read and with the liberal use of correction fluid, scalpel and embroidery floss, transforms the book from art criticism into feminist verse. Though the maternal body appears with frequency in Read’s illustrated text which spans from prehistory to the modern age, he includes zero female artists. Her Read, a graphic poem is an excavation of buried voices, a reclamation of bodies framed in gilt and an homage to those whose arts remain unsung.
Comments are closed.