Some artists weave wool blankets, and others make patchwork quilts. The first type of artist unifies and stirs. The second kind wants us to see the fragments and pieces of the puzzles they sit before.
Leah Umansky is the second kind of artist. In her book of poems,
Domestic Uncertainties (published by
BlazeVOX [books]), she shows us the world in pieces (as it is, maybe): lines from Virginia Woolf, text broken into columns and boxes. This is a book about reading books, but also about reading relationships, love, gender, break-ups, and choices. “Pull back at the auto-correct,” she entreats us in one poem, “Repeated for Emphasis, “Take back the margin, and the typographical errors are fab./[aren’t they?]”
Speaking of the margin, her poems are so visually engaging--more traditional-looking, left-aligned poems strain against their leashes into the right side of the page; some are thick paragraphs of prose that extend across the whole page; others are reminiscent of exams, with multiple choice options, fill-in-the-blanks, and text in boxes. The book itself is a square--an unusual and smart choice that works so well in housing these poems.
I admire how natural the design of this book feels. It is never heavy-handed. This might come from the fact that Leah is also a talented collage artist (this striking cover, shown above, is one of her creations). Her work feels alive and spontaneous and surprising on the page.
NOTE: After the interview, read a preview of the book. Order your copy of the book here, where you can also view the book preview.
Q: As a collage artist and poet, what is your relationship to fragments and pieces? When you make collages, does it feel the same as making poems? Why or why not?
I feel like I’ve always made collages. Like every teenager, my bedroom walls were covered in snippets of magazines and so were my dorm rooms in college. When I became an adult and lived on my own, I turned to the refrigerator. (How domestic!!) All the fridges, in every apartment I’ve ever had, have always been a medium for collage, but so has every pegboard above my desk. I like surrounding myself with things I love, desire and enjoy.
I always rip things out of newspapers and magazines and put them into a folder, and for years they sort of just sat there in my drawer. Thinking about it now, it wasn’t until I got separated and then divorced that I actually started making collage holiday cards for my friends. This is all in my book – I had to make a new version of myself, was forced to, and it had to be one that didn’t fully align with the old version of myself. As in my poem “In Dreams Bare,” “all day versions of us align.”
In creating this new version, I created a new self and pasted on parts of my previous life into it. What I mean to say is, my life was fragmented. Everything I knew was wrong. I was now this new thing, a divorcee. I was now this new woman trying to write her way through something devastating. I did it, I wrote the poems, but they are fragmented. They remained disjointed and I think that’s where my collages exist, too. Perhaps, I picked up the pieces my self and made them pretty-like.
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