Yusef and I have been collaborating in call and response for many years with night animals paintings and poems. Think of this chapbook as an early excerpt of the completed works to be collected in their entirety. A publication of a hardcover volume that includes all of the poems and paintings from throughout our process is forthcoming.
If you’re planning on buying a copy you can hit me up HERE with your address and I’ll send you a PayPal link with a shipping price. The books are $15 + Shipping and should be in the mail within a few days of order.
In an interview with Michael Collins in the African diaspora arts journal Callaloo, Yusef had this to say about the collaboration:
”I saw the images from Rachel Bliss’s work before I met her, in a catalogue entitled A State of Bliss, curated by Dr. James Dickinson at the Rider University Gallery. I was struck by the originality in her work. Also, I kept returning to the following paragraph in the catalogue:
Many small works depict strange, demented, and surreal animals. However, to interpret them exclusively in a traditional manner, as evidence of an imaginary world of dreams and fantasy, would be a mistake, for an intense realism informs Bliss’s depiction of this menagerie. As Bliss recalls, a neighbor, Farmer Jim, began collecting exotic birds and animals, keeping them in an alley that connected with Bliss’s house. For a while, the collection made for an unbelievable sight, contradicting the grimness of surrounding conditions: “Here were these animals-which at the beginning were so wonderful and totally out of place- in the midst of drunks smashing bottles against factories the screams of sex workers being beaten up by men under the El, loud car stereos which set off car alarms all down our street, and all the empty crack vials, dirty needles, and used condoms that I swept up every morning off my front step”. The family enjoyed “waking up to the animals… the rooster cock-a-doodle-dooing, the pigs oinking, and the huge peacock staring at us through our bathroom window.” But abuse and neglect plagued the surviving animals. The surreal imagery of the animal paintings records a real situation. As Bliss puts it: “I use fantastic color to remember the beauty of the animals but if they look sad and somewhat demented it’s because they were.”
Night Animals has been a recurring title in my head for more than ten years, long before I saw an image by Rachel. I knew I wanted to write poems about nocturnal creatures, animals, and human beings. So, in this sense, we were already walking on a similar landscape before our paths crossed.
Most of Rachel’s works are portraits, which seem to me to be the most difficult, time-consuming avenues or approaches in creating visual art. Faces demand differences even if they are only slightly varied, such as identical twins. Each portrait is a concise study- an active meditation and/or approximation. Rachel is a natural surrealist. Authentic surprise is interfused into the character of each piece - a personality. It seems that her highly developed graphic skills give her the ability of a gifted psychologist who can capture the mental landscape through visual depiction: the mind made flesh through paint and texture. Some of her most provocative pieces appear as chimeras that have wandered out of a state of mind. But because of her technique and process, nothing is an accident. Everything’s deliberate, and intensely deliberated on. Intention bends to her control; a tough beauty emerges from the thoughtful hues. In this sense, Rachel’s ability to find beauty and celebrate it is what drew me to her work. For her, destiny is often a reality: the crippled songbird lands on her shoulder because she has the heart to help it. If one detects or glimpse violence in a piece of hers, it isn’t accidental or ornamental: it underlines the state of affairs in America- personal and public, urban and rural. Together, as collaborators we are interested in creating dialogue.”