Stephanie Arsoska is one of the poets that has contributed to my ongoing Book of Sand project where poets respond to art and artists respond to poems. Below is Stephanie’s beautiful and haunting poem and her thoughts on the experience of taking part.
Girl in Blue
The knife daughter
slices yesterday into boxes,
cutting all the little things away.
Her song is a dark needle
reaching to where sky
hems the land.
Here a girl can start
to unstitch herself,
unravel ghosts,
until her broken voice
clears the sky.
Stephanie Arsoska
“Participating in the second Book of Sand was a very special experience. I hadn’t anticipated how intimate it would feel to both be sent a piece of artwork to respond to and then to see someone else respond creatively to my own work. It was exciting to see how someone had chosen to lift my words from the page and make them into something beautiful. I don’t usually write from images either so it was a new way of working for me and I certainly can’t draw or paint myself so it was fascinating to collaborate with people who work in this way. I just hope I have done the piece of art that I was sent justice with my response! I am very much looking forward to seeing the whole thing come together, the interaction between the two forms is something unique and I am excited to see how the final book looks.”
Karen Dennison 