Gradients
from Post Asemic Press
Snodgrass’s Gradients is a haunting series of visual poems, examining the relationships between images and ideologies, particularly the misogynistic currents in American commercial discourse and its depictions of femininity. Asemic poems, written or tattooed directly onto the poet’s body, are photographed and then transformed by the poet through glitching. The resulting “Gradients” allow perversely fascinating visions of societal structures that emerge from obliterations of the female form. The reader is at once reminded of the ideological implications of any image, so often and so easily overlooked and accepted, as well as the role of the viewer in creating the real world affects of these implications. It is an astonishing book!
—Andrew Brenza
Nodes
Glitch(ing) colors –and- sights –and- sounds –and^3… The destru-construction comes so naturally as to become all-most play-ful-ly dancing [in-the-dark] wearing sunglasses. This meditative trance of cosmic *glitch* energy jives with Jazz –and- movement –and- be(ing) – and.... It glitch(es) because it can-not help but do so. It glitch(es) because it lives beyond its own bound-@-ry. Alive and vibrant, this assertion of being in-and-out-of time exists BeYond yours-ours-mine-its/own “expect-ations”… It breathes its/own rhythm, its/own synchroniCity. It opens its/own Portal into the neon transcendence of time –and- space –and- dis-harmonious wonder! Follow along with Brian Hall and Kristine Snodgrass in this journey of music –and- sound-wave –and- visual-ization –and-purposeful dis-intention-ality; allow yourself to be swept up-up-and=away into the neon lights of the GL1TCH itSelf.
-Jennifer Weigel
These spectacular and colorful collaborations between Hall and Snodgrass begin to answer how it is possible to bridge the gap between music and visual art. The represention of sound comes through in the peaks and valleys of these glitches. Music for the eyes, and colors in the ear. What a marvellous way to collaborate and create such new eye candy!
-Virgil Suarez
This collab is a psychedelic intermedia masterpiece, a synesthetic journey that should remind us all of a basic truth: poetry is a type of music! If you like the kind of tune that you can hear and see in colours that make your eyeballs tingle, get yourself a copy of this book!
-Mike Di Tommaso
Robot, Girl
Kristine Snodgrass's first full-length solo poetry collection reads like a feminist thriller (third-wave, of course) or a terrifying sci-fi glimpse of our American future (or present!), complete with lady robots, stellar journeys, irrational fling-flang, and language yanked so alarmingly it fractals into repetitive codes, cyphers, and brash exclamation points. It's both nightmare and portal. Girl and girl noir. It's quirky, entertaining, obsessive, and scanning for trouble: one poet's vision you're too stunned to look away from.
-Maureen Seaton
LOOM
The best of these images makes me think of what would have happened if Dali and Warhol had a child and that child grew up to glitch like a rock star. Snodgrass and Rae deconstruct classic album covers to bring attention to the old constructs of feminine objectivity to make new and stunning art pieces. The line becomes the medium and message. Powerful and thought-provoking.
-Virgil Suarez
In LOOM, Kristine Snodgrass and Collin J. Rae turn the machine against itself, peeling back modernity’s formaldehyde flesh to reveal something far more sinister and seductive. These delirious decompositions stutter and sputter, glitch/kitsch tea leaves for lost futures.
-Joy Ray
Godlessness
Godlessness takes the participant on a journey through the heart and bones of uninhabited structures in an unknown place and time where you don't know the language, the culture, or it's people yet found within every space explored are the stories of past lives and of those yet to be lived and it all feels distinctly like they could be your own.
-Kerri Pullo
Neon Galax with Afterword by Jim Leftwich
Glitched collabs from Andrew Brenza and Kristine Snodgrass find a neon outlet in the merging of vispo and digital alteration. This striking book features color-saturated work that enlivens the structural bombast inherent in Brenza and Snodgrass's stark visual poetry. What is glitched is not superceded nor muted, rather transformed in a true collaborative spirit.
Rank
There is a journey between the source image and the target image in the glitch. From the surface to the bottom. From what is rationally structured to what is its original code. In Rank, Kristine Snodgrass places side-by-side visual works and poetic writings that share the same root: a subversive intention with respect to the abused and crystallized languages of everyday communication and power, in search of what is subterranean, corporeal, germinal. "Syllables of mortal flesh," she writes. A gesture - in images and words - almost physical and performative, which demystifies the apparent and reveals the substantial. An act, which becomes aesthetic, of deconstruction and re-creation through the "error" caused in the image file on the one hand and in the structure of the written text on the other. The result, on the visual side, is different works in which the signification is entrusted to the constituent elements of color (phosphorescent and iridescent or transparent with suggestions of watercolor, inked and scratched or pasty, intensely sampled in the drafting of blacks and blues or fiery red), of the line (vertical, horizontal, or intertwined), of the sign (thick as erasures or minute as germinations, with words or syllables as resistance to slipping), of the composition (orthogonal, or specular, geometrically full-bodied or extremely fragmented). On the writing side, the "error," consisting of the vital and magmatic automatism of the flow of consciousness, deconstructs the language of rational communication, producing texts in which the different levels of experience collide, provoking sparks meaning, flashes, and illuminations. On both sides, closely connected, the heuristic encounter between author and user in search of a possible lost communication takes place. The error, the glitch (with what it implies of chance and chaos), the imperfection, forcefully brings back the uncontrolled complexity of life into the artificial simplification of the constituted order, that singular unrepeatable uniqueness capable of producing its own "native sound": "The ensuing light is a spirit departed from blood."
-Cinzia Farina
American Apparell
American Apparell is a collection that demands numerous revisits. Each portrait feels like a creed, a collective of fists already held up high. This pulsating kaleidoscopic visual representation of modern feminism revitalizes female independence and identity, challenging the reader not to accept archaic ideas churned out by society but instead to consent to the total disintegration of conformity. Beauty blooms in the wake of necessary destruction.
—Johann Van Der Walt
Whistle
The first in the Asemic Front Series curated by De Villo Sloan, this is a book of collaborative visual poetry and asemic writing (writing without meaning) that explores communication, gender, and power. Over 50 images by Kristine Snodgrass and De Villo Sloan and an introduction by De Villo Sloan.
Out of the World
What makes "Out of the World" extraordinary is Snodgrass' relentless pursuit of play in the theater of her own fantastically absurd universe. Fierce and fluorescent, her poetry pierces as it lures and lulls the reader into bliss. It doesn't wobble or stagnate. Doesn't wait to be heard. When you open this book, sit with a plate of dinner rolls. Be thankful for the Appalachian foothills and dogs in space. For the wrens and language that is full of bones.
—Neil de la Flor Author of Almost Dorothy
Two Thieves & a Liar
Storming the genders of Americanismo with crossed fingers and sans rules, these poems contradict the text by adding values and filling out applications. Two voices and three voices are threaded to one and the resulting operatic tool digs up the shades of birds, mathematics, riots, and catastrophe. Experience a disturbing disintegration of authorial identity. Experience that identity reshape and reassemble as an intelligent chimera that stares you in the face with as many faces as you can imagine.
— Natalija Grgorinic & Ognjen Raden
When I interviewed these three authors about how they "did" it, that is to say, collaborate, it wasn't like I received three sets of answers. Group mind groped, it was like talking to the tank.
— Terese Svoboda
Cover art: Pamela Callahan, “West Nile Kid.” (Courtesy of the artist and Woman Made Gallery, Chicago