valerie witte

LATEST BOOK AVAILABLE

A Rupture in the Interiors, from Airlie Press

Polyphony of silk and skin, A Rupture in the Interiors is a rapturous exploration of im/perfection, threading innovative form and histories of value—of the female body, especially, and of material worth—with dream logic and associative mastery. This is a modern tapestry of everyday traumas that, while seemingly minor, mark us all as participants in the human experience. Woven together, these images of disorder and defect tell a story of the superficial damage that runs deep, and that cannot slip from us unseen or unfelt.

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Reviews

Like the plot of a mystery story, Valerie Witte’s latest poetry collection develops through a series of carefully placed, linked details. Multiple voices, weaving tales of abrasions, glances, and micro-traumas, contribute to the poems’ fragmented qualities. The effect is an eerie building of tension as small events lead to larger ones within an evolution of associative leaps. — Erica Goss, Sticks & Stones

Reading A Rupture in the Interiors is a delightfully tactile experience, similar to viewing an artist’s book. Artist’s books often include tangible aspects, such as handmade or found materials and textures or interactive elements. While Rupture exists in a standard poetry book format, readers’ senses are fully involved in the themes because of Witte’s attention to structure and word usage. — Heidi Kasa, Barrelhouse

Witte’s poems, ‘assembled / [by] a recruitment of parts,’ turn as ‘a woman’s wheel turned… / never failing,’ ‘treating the wounded’ in ‘a bewilderment / process / called / reckoning,’ making A Rupture in the Interiors a moving and permeating read. — Jami Macarty, NewPages

Witte’s lyric is knitted, stitched; a lyric that plays not simply with threading as imagery and content but as structure, and her threads are myriad, almost polyphonic and multi-directional, writing on perception and the body, and the very idea of what holds, however precarious it might sometimes seem, everything together. — rob mclennan, rob mclennan’s blog

Valerie Witte’s ambitious, densely associative poems offer a ‘tissue of stories unfolding’ in which she reinvents the very nature of skin: as map, as strata, as a process of reckoning. Here, Witte takes on the challenge of embodiment, its coils and fugitive film, bringing the reader into a richly lyrical disorientation. This poetry shows us emotional intensity forcing its way through the ostensible surface. The revelation? What covers us is really ‘a continual state of turnover.’ — Elizabeth Robinson

Valerie Witte’s sensuous and harrowing A Rupture in the Interiors investigates the notion of skin as sheath, as protection, and projection.... The wonder of this book is how it makes one feel as though one is holding not page, not book, but the fine texture of skin itself. Ultimately, this book strikes the song of the body’s largest and most visible organ, where we are the most vulnerable, where we first appear then finally disappear where “we are almost human anyway. — Gillian Conoley

Valerie Witte’s poems record the aftermaths of such ruptures, including interiors suddenly visible. Punctuation’s vertical bars and brackets become visual poetry for scars and wounds. What’s articulated in between are metaphors for what else exists in the universe, both physically outside as well as psychologically inside. Thus, Witte’s poems accomplish poetry’s most empathetic aspiration: that to bring a poem into the world is to bring the world into a poem. — Eileen R. Tabios

A Rupture in the Interiors reads like an archaeological excavation where artifacts reveal themselves in unexpected combinations, torn from the contexts that would explain their presence....There’s a larger story, below the surface, lost or dispersed, beyond the reach of our excavation. That muted story divulges as it withholds, tantalizing us with uncertainty, impelling us to try to fill in the gaps between the details set before us. — Mary Burger

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