Amaranth Borsuk publishes new chapbook

Last month, Above/Ground Press in Ottawa published W/\SH: Initial Contact, a collaborative chapbook created by IAS faculty member Amaranth Borsuk with poet and artist Terri Witek. This small book of poetry is the first part of a longer speculative ecopoetic manuscript that includes work in a number of different forms, including audio, video, and frottage art. Founded in 1993 by Rob McLennan, Above/Ground Press publishes the poetry journal Touch the Donkey and Periodicities: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics, as well as chapbooks and broadsides of contemporary poetry.

Initial Contact consists of transmissions sent between women on two worlds, one beset by torrential rains and the other by extensive drought. In W/\SH, these women use several different modes (codes, frottage maps, letters, and sound transmissions) to communicate with one another in an attempt to balance out their two worlds, exchanging citizen science, myths, and vernacular traditions in the hopes that something will allow them to course-correct for the sake of their children, who will inherit their derelict worlds.

Terri Witek is the author of 7 books of poetry: her newest collection is The Rattle Egg (2021). Recent work has been featured in two new international anthologies: JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (2021), and in the WAAVe Global Anthology of women’s asemic writing and visual poetry (forthcoming).