She Speaks Tongues

Poet and visual artist Karla van Vliet's bold, inspiring, and mediative new book, She Speaks Tongues, is in the great traditions of asemic writing, abstract and surrealist art, calligraphy, and graffiti, Zen and American pastoral poetry. In this collection, Van Vliet enacts how the art of the line (visual and poetic), like Mirtha Dermisache's "Libro No 1," is part of our aesthetic intuition, where we create meaning from the known and unknown spaces of our "blessings and despair." These pages, illuminated by the power of the great spirit, are where "the wind sings into every torn and ragged place in my body." Hers is a tender poetry that takes the landscape into the great thunder of meaning where "plums like words" suffice in a world here "your absence was an orchard." She Speaks Tongues is a kind of creation myth for our time. In this book I find solace and grace and a great generous spirit. -- Elizabeth A.I. Powell, author of Atomizer and Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter "I came to this river like I was coming home," writes Karla Van Vliet in She Speaks Tongues. That describes the way I come to Van Vliet's poetry and art. "Home" here is more mood than place, more symbol than certainty, but for a fleeting moment on each page of She Speaks Tongues, you will find (or feel) it. In poems verbal and visual, in psalm, song, sign, and sigh, Karla Van Vliet offers us the many names of home. -- Jean LeBlanc, poet and asemic artist, author of Ancient Songs of Us