ARTIST STATEMENT
“Solar Eclipse” is a letterpress broadside of a piece from my book, PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022). This poem is a solid block of text that depicts my bodymind in high gear, a manic state that “competes with the sun.” Unlike the energetic pace of the language, my progress with recreating that language in physical form was slow. I welcomed the tactile delight and meditation of setting type and turning the wheel of the press.
I am bipolar, a psych system/shock survivor and a mad activist. PSYCH MURDERS is a hybrid memoir poetry book that takes readers inside my experiences of shock treatments, psychiatric wards, and suicidal ideation, toward new futures of care. I hope this work amplifies the need for new paradigms of mental health care outside closets, attics, prisons, and wards.
My creative practice is embedded in my life as a poet, dancer, and disabled person. These disciplines are fluid and inform each other in my work. My inquiries delve into somatic experiences and how the body inhabits the page, words inhabit the body, and how the environment we place our bodyminds in can stimulate new awareness. Water flows through my work as vehicle, home, vibration. Movement creates new choreographies on the page. The page is a site of possibility through my experiments in book arts and letterpress printing. The failure of language has its heartbeats at the edges, of what can’t be contained, an abandoned gesture, spit. Collaboration is also central to my process. Much of my writing is seeded in somatic play with others. This could be with people, or with environments, or both. This crossing of disciplines and engagement with the world around me are key for making. Another important component of my work is the form poems take on the page. Influenced by movement improvisation and choreography, the flow of language on the page, the shape it takes, and the shapes I make out of paper are critical to my work process. I’m interested in the stops, the gaps between movements, stillness, silence.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe land in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, psych system/shock survivor, bipolar, and a member of the Olimpias, a disability performance collective. Her poetry collections are the hybrid memoir poem PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022), which invites the reader inside psychiatric wards and shock treatments toward new futures of care, and The Color She Gave Gravity (Operating System, 2017), which explores the seams of language, movement, and mental health difference. Her work has appeared in journals such as Orion, Sonora Review, BathHouse, Venti, Rogue Agent, Ecotone, Anomaly, Bombay Gin, and Dunes Review.
© Stephanie Heit