Laura Wetherington Surreal-Absurd Sampler

From 2018 to 2023 I tried to write sonnets that excavated Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative in order to illuminate residues of US colonialism in the present. I wanted to metabolize her racist text into some kind of healing. That work was grueling and it largely failed, as most of my poems do. Last summer I realized I needed to move away from the library, away from academic research, and find the metabolization and healing some other way. Thylias Moss once said to me that the knots and turns in a tree’s branches are all evidence of failures, but in the context of a complex system, they make the tree beautiful and unique. I turned to the trees, first with tree rubbings, and then with collage. I am making new sonnets, visual ones then, in the spirit of Antonin Artaud’s desire to get outside of language. Through these sonnets I am looking for a liberated expression that’s not nonsense, but beyond sense. I am a surrealist as he was: decidedly on the outside, and always searching for another world. - Laura Wetherington

Laura Wetherington is the author of the books Parallel Resting Places and A Map Predetermined and Chance. Her most recent pamphlet is Little Machines.