We are poets, but Lauren is also a visual artist who writes graphic novels and short comics. We’ve collaborated a couple of times before on what Lauren calls poem-comics. It’s a genre that brings together two forms that usually don’t have a lot of truck with one another, where the visual accompaniments create something new out of the two forms.
Jesse and Lauren met in Iowa City, and eventually began collaborating. Lauren would take a poem and deepen it by creating a graphic element—by adding new layers and visual rhythms, by bringing out elements in the words that were latent but unseen in the poem. It’s not that Lauren illustrates it, but more that she makes another kind of poem out of it, inside it, and the two entwine to create a new, genre-less poetry. At least that’s one of the ways we think about it. But it doesn’t really matter what you call it.
The words in this one come from translations of sayings from the region of Kansas where Jesse grew up, arranged in such a way that the lines speak to and against one another. It’s a voice that turns out to be many voices, a voice that feels the truth in extreme and contradictory positions.
—Jesse Nathan and Lauren Haldeman
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