Meghan Kelsey, David Joseph, Steven Michael Abell, Joel Salcido, Susan Nguyen
Art - Time-Based Sculptures
Five Arizona Poets
Joel Salcido is the son of Mexican immigrants, a first-generation college graduate, a husband and father of three sons. He is the recipient of a University Graduate Fellowship from Arizona State University and a Virginia G. Piper Creative Research Fellowship. He is the editor-in-Chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review and an MFA candidate in poetry at Arizona State University.
David Joseph’s creative work has appeared in Hobart, Cheap Pop, Entropy, W.W. Norton’s Hint Fiction anthology, and elsewhere. He earned his BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at Arizona State University. Connect with him on Twitter: @dfhjoseph
Meghan Kelsey, David Joseph, Steven Michael Abell, Joel Salcido, Susan Nguyen
Time-Based Sculptures
Over the course of one week in 2018, five Arizona-based poets composed and documented a series of time-based sculptures from the materials of their everyday. The images that follow reflect (practically and fantastically) some of the ways in which their expressions of race, gender and ability manifest in the meshing of their physical and mental landscapes.
- Sarrettta Morgan
Meghan Kelsey
“You think that whatever is happening after all this time is a solution being born”
- Molly McCully Brown
Stephen Hawking had just died. In an article remembering his accomplishments I read that as years passed, people urged Hawking to replace his outdated voice system program, the Equalizer. He refused, expressing that his identity was now formed around this program and he wouldn’t “be himself” if it changed. I had just upgraded to a functional pair of hearing aids and it struck me that I, too, was a cyborg—reliant upon technology to communicate. It can be a complicated and beautiful way to live. Who am I with my costly, electronic ears? Who would I be otherwise?
The expensive seed is in a good place on a sunny day and birth is normative progress.
Meghan Kelsey, 2018
Bluetooth pairing may offer a small amount of freedom in the energy of the organic movement of a nervous system.
Meghan Kelsey, 2018
A blending of voices so one difference cannot be distinguished from another is a version of art and its audience.
Meghan Kelsey, 2018
David Joseph (After Molly McCully Brown)
For a few years I’ve been composing written fragments exploring the relationships between and around nine-year-old fraternal twins, a fictional sister and brother. In composing these sculptures, I was working to refine and complicate the twins’ yearnings and preoccupations—and mine—doubling and division, nature and family, displacement and loss, God and love. With titles mined from poems and essays by Molly McCully Brown, the images aspire to expose the permeable bounds of the un/shared body.
The Echo of My Sibling's Name Inside My Own.
David Joseph, 2018.
The Fearful and Wonderful Disassembly of a Hundred Gods.
David Joseph, 2018.
The Emptiest, Most Forgiving Part of Me Is Tired of Feeling Responsible for Silence.
David Joseph, 2018.
Steven Michael Abell
My prescriptions tell you what kind of a poet I am for their side-effects. For the conditions they treat. My medications are a substance and a tool and a subject. They help me figure out what to draw and write and build. I fucking hate every single one of them. I need them. I am married to them. They are there for me every morning and every night.
Making a Long Putt to Save Par on Hole 18 at The Fun Forest.
Steven Michael Abell, 2018.
Blurred Vision Loss of Balance Complete Lack of Enterprise Easier to Capture Dry Mouth Vivid Dreams Nausea Grogginess Paranoia.
Steven Michael Abell, 2018.
CVS Pharmacy Bought My Insurance Company.
Steven Michael Abell, 2018.
Joel Salcido
I produced these manipulated digital photographs with materials in my backyard and the office where I work. My intention was to curate and then alter the images until they resembled what I conceptualized as entrances into the impossible.
Alleyway Entrance to a Borgesian Labyrinth.
Joel Salcido, 2018.
Broken Stairway in the Key of Fibonacci.
Joel Salcido, 2018.
The Maze of Post-Late Capitalism.
Joel Salcido, 2018.
Susan Nguyen
Unending
I am learning how to hold grief in my mouth. Something alive until it isn't.
Like a field is a field until it isn’t, until it is just the color green.
Listen when I tell you how a field folds into a clover when I am on my hands,
how the memory of what I am looking for is not as important as the ground it claims.
I don’t mean that grief can be unalive.
Or that I keep it loaded in that place between lower lip and teeth.
I mean I never walked the land where my father harvested seeds.
In his field, he waited for green to bend into gold.
It would start in the center: a single blade splitting light until there was nothing else.
My father remembers. I watch my shadow.
Both feel like grief.
I was born here, sinking into mud, and I mean to return.
On my hands, I am digging.
“An American Burial ii”: What is Buried is Not What Remains.
Susan Nguyen, 2018.
“Euphoria Ringed with Uncertainty”: (Another Word for Possibility, Danger).
Susan Nguyen, 2018.
“Where I Am Offering My Body / Where My Body is An Offering”: Happy to Be Here.
Susan Nguyen, 2018.
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Questions for the creator:
What are 2 - 3 books (regardless of genre) that you've read over the last year or less that really blew your hair back?
Estilo/Style by Dolores Dorantes, Lanny by Max Porter, Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li.
Who is someone you admire who does work that you feel really benefits your “local” community, and what kind of work is it that they do?
I deeply admire Rosaura "Chawa" Magaña and her staff at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore in Phoenix, AZ. The store's stated mission is: "To promote cultural representation and diversity through literature, language, and the arts." They fully embody this mission, through free workshops and readings, their monthly POC It To Me Open Mic Night, partnerships with arts organizations such as Lostintheletters, and countless other contributions to the community.
How should concerned students, faculty, staff on college campuses approach visiting conservative speakers who may have offensive points of view?
With bullhorns.
In 40 years what will people be nostalgic for? The color green.
Meghan Kelsey earned her MFA in poetry from Arizona State. She is from Tempe, Arizona and is currently a 7th grade Waldorf teacher.
Steven Michael Abell received his BA at The University of Montana in Missoula and is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at Arizona State University.
Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in Arizona. She received her MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Award. In 2018, she was featured on PBS NewsHour as “one of three women poets to watch” and she was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry.