Concordance

Concordance is a new collaborative work by three acclaimed contemporary artists: poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and sculptor Kiki Smith, working with book artist Anne McKeown. Inspired by Smith's image of a dandelion, whose floating silks she compares to reading, the poem traces agreements and embeddings of human and animal bodies, ideas, dreams, and emotion in a concordance of parallel and contingent contexts. "Then it's possible to undo misunderstanding from inside by tracing the flight or thread of empty space running through things." Then what if, in that bond, "images were Eros as words?" In Smith's etchings, reading, as Eros, is drawn as seeds, feathers, star-like explosions, pods, wide-eyed, unblinking owls. "Animals . . . open their eyes, and a mirror forms on the ground." The effects of the verbal images and gray-blue inked drawings are stunning and other-worldly.

This book is the second Kelsey Street Press collaboration between Berssenbrugge and Smith. The first, Endocrinology, was originally produced in 1998 as a fine art edition by U.L.A.E. and printed in a facsimile edition by Kelsey Street in 2005. Concordance was brought out in an edition of thirty by Anne McKeown of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper in an accordion format.