baleen
a poem in twelve days
BALEEN: A POEM IN TWELVE DAYS
Published with Ursus Americanus Press in the Fall of ‘22, this collaborative chapbook-length poem is one fruit of my decade-long collaboration with Portuguese visual & mixed-media artist Vicente Sampaio. Snag your copy here.
“In BALEEN, a Poem in Twelve Days, Greek-American poet, Cea, and Portuguese artist, Vincent Sampaio, reflect on queer yearning, illness, and place as a locus of escape, not unlike Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. However, unlike Mann's novella, tragedy is not so certain. Illness doesn't mean death. Yearning doesn't mean loss. Cea's yearning is amorphous and undulant like the water they find respite in. There seems to be no component of the poem that is not also of the sea as they move, reflectively, in and out of one another. "I crush my poem to seashells," Day Five goes, "ocean it out examine the water's wares / & I will get this wrong all rust & ruins / bobbing up from the foam". Art from Sampaio responds to these crushing moments—a broken ionic column, a slippery body melding with water, a clam with teeth tonguing a pearl, one feels as uncannily in a distant memory as much as a ruin. In Cea's world, what is fragmentary is also whole, like synecdoche made literal, the parts not representative of something complete but complete in and of themselves, as if what we fail to recapture in memory makes it any less of one. What's the difference anyway between a memory and a ruin?”