There was still space inside the fridge. I don’t think my fears would have minded having company, but I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t want to risk contaminating my fears with a new fear. I wasn’t sure who the new fear belonged to, if it belonged to me, if the new fear qualified as fear. Does shame qualify as fear? In my opinion, a fridge’s interior light, the combination of glass and plastic is too elegant a space to have to contain shame and other food items. With the exception of Nutella. Nutella emits light. Nutella is wasted inside a fridge.
Orange
Christine Herzer
July 2018
I always feel more respectful of the world when I’ve been reading this poet.
Laura Mullen
Orange is concerned with space-making. Orange contains declarations (“Poets are containers. Containers deserve respect”) and language-situations, including the hire of a professional lover to address money issues. Reading Orange might impact the way you experience words such as ‘fridge’, ‘fear‘, ‘toast’, and ‘handwash’. If Orange had a texture it would be soft. If you believe that feelings smell, Orange might be for you. Sometimes a color can hold a space that is otherwise shadowed/obscured/unknowable.
About the Author
Christine Herzer is an artist, poet and teacher. Working across mediums (drawing, text, language-objects, installation, video, workshop), her practice employs accumulation and gestures of ‘over-layering’, ‘covering up’, ‘erasing’, ‘interrupting/disrupting’ and ‘complicating’, in order to address and process questions of invisibility + meaning (= love). Her writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and online publications, including Fence, The Offending Adam, The Volta, Blackbox Manifold, RealPoetik, Seymour Magazine, and 3:AM Magazine. She has taught Creative Writing in India at Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune, and The National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. Herzer is the 2018 Laureate ‘Ecritures’ of a writing residency at La Cité des Arts, Paris, where she will be using her ongoing series of ‘‘Written Drawings” as a living archive from which to direct her investigations into such questions as: What is the role of repetition in the creative process? How to show caring/devotion for words, as well as their meanings (emotional centers) and [ab]uses?
Praise
Inviting us to live, in Orange, in the “crisis of desire,” where our actions and feelings startle us, where words cross boundaries to become our own while remaining strange, Christine Herzer suggests the possibility of showing compassion to fear, facing shame, and considering the costs of being perceived as deserving, for instance. What is the price of being provided for? What does a particular color mean? What do you remember? The encounter with Herzer’s willingness to upend the usual social sexual arrangements in favor of large, lyric and gorgeously posed questions gives experience a new intensity and depth: I always feel more respectful of the world when I’ve been reading this poet—I take less for granted, I realize (again) I am (only) a guest here. “Belonging is a matter of light,” writes Herzer—what I love about this work is the fierce, open and constantly reaffirmed willingness to go on in the dark, solitary, true to the interest in and difficulties of “space-making,” at once wildly imaginative and bravely honest.
Laura Mullen
The wandering narrator of Christine Herzer's Orange is a "light detective" who rejects, reclaims and rewrites her own narrative [including her mother] in the space of poetry. Orange is a book about resisting female narratives, from maternity to dependency. Herzer's revisioned narrative pursues knowledge as light, as freedom, and, most importantly, as resistance to darkness and servitude. I was entranced by this book about a crisis of desire and the relentless pursuit of art.
Suzanne Scanlon
What this book does not contain is a feeling of satiety. Yet the speaker finds value paying for love, not only metaphorically but literally, even amidst grave anxieties, icy facts. Wife. Mother. Prostitute. Poet. What they have in common, if anything, becomes worthy of our consideration. And shame. What a tour de force this book turns out to be, this sacral force majeure.
Timothy Liu
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Publication Details
Chapbook
staple-bound. 24 pp, 7 x 9 in
Publication Date: July 01 2018
Distribution: Direct Only