Texas Review Press is pleased to announce the Her Read, by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, has been announced a 2021 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year in Poetry! In a competition with over 2,000 other entrants, it’s pretty great to have made it this far. Stay tuned for the winner announcement on June 16, 2022.
An erasure of Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art, a seminal work of art criticism first published in 1931, Her Read is a hybrid text “part sculpture part theatre part hospital.”
In the summer of 2016, rendered otherwise speechless by the amplification of hate on the national stage, and its resonance with silencing in Steinorth’s personal life, she began a hybrid project, at once poetry and visual art. Appropriating a library discard of The Meaning of Art, by Herbert Read (Faber & Faber, 1931), and with liberal use of correction fluid and ink, she began excavating a first-person lyric. From the voice of the male critic surveying the cannon of male artists, she imagined voice(s) of womxn—objects become authors, become artists.
“For, by erasure, Steinorth reveals a hidden presence in those buried centuries of female artistry, an erasure of an erasure. Her trickster liberates not just new text, but creates, through additives, a brilliant hyper-inventive visual artistry. So that what begins in erasure transforms, as the book goes on, into a rich, layered graphic poem whose meanings emerge through skill in design and delight in pattern and texture—an artist’s and a builder’s and designer’s eye collaborating with a poet’s tongue, and a dancer’s knowledge of how expression begins in the body.”
—from an introduction by Eleanor Wilner, Recipient of Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in Poetry
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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