Her Read: A Graphic Poem
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
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.
“Her Read is a book of wicked elation. Enacting revelation through effacement, divination through artistry, and lyric out of transgression, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth has produced a poem that is ‘love suffused with iron.’ Dismantling and refashioning the patriarchal story of art, of women in art, of women making art, Her Read necessarily begins in pain, but it transmutes that pain into the energy of recovery, inscribing into art the utterances that were not found or welcomed there. Her Read is singular, a book that none of its readers will ever forget.”
—Rick Barot, author of The Galleon
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth is a poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist, and licensed builder. The author of A Wake with Nine Shades (2019), finalist for Foreword Reviews Best of the Indie Press Award and Forking the Swift (2009), she has received grants from Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Community of Writers, and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior, The Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Plume, Rhino, TriQuarterly and elsewhere.
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