But poet Elisabeth Frost’s new collaboration with visual artist Dianne Kornberg creates interplay among words and images, giving new form to both mediums and inspiring new possibilities in which to imagine expression.

Bindle (Ricochet Editions, 2015) took root when a curator chose Frost and Kornberg to create a visual installation for the 2009 Poetic Dialogue Project.

“We did not know each other,” said Frost, a professor in the Department of English. “Luckily, we liked each other’s work right away.”

Tasked with creating a collaborative exhibit of their work, the two artists spent a week at Kornberg’s studio in the San Juan Islands north of Seattle. There, Frost became inspired by Kornberg’s interest in specimens collected for scientific study and her photographs of the natural world.

The result was a series of diptychs called “Arachne,” a blend of Kornberg’s photo-based images with Frost’s writing, inspired by a metaphoric interest in spiders and their webs.

Frost and Kornberg have continued to collaborate ever since. Bindle reproduces a selection of their work in book form for the first time.

“Arachne,” which makes up one section of the book, represents the stages of a spider’s life—launching its web, building an intricate structure, waiting passively for prey, and consuming food.. The last image ruminates on the Greek myth of its namesake, the woman-turned-spider.

Bindle’s theme of home and transformation in the natural world is explored in two more sections. The first features a series of photos of birds’ nests, in which Kornberg and Frost contrast scientific and poetic ways of interpreting them.

The images incorporate Frost’s research-based text derived from both Romantic poems and 19^th-century manuals describing the popular ladies’ hobby of nest collecting (caliology).

“Collecting nests was a class-based activity for the wealthy; at the same time, the fact that such a hobby was making a dent into the male-dominated field of scientific inquiry was fascinating to me,” she said.

In the third section, Frost and Kornberg took inspiration from their monthlong artist’s residency in Oysterville, Washington, where they saw the mounds of oyster shells following the harvest. On the page, Kornberg’s complex, textured photos of shell-piles sit atop of Frost’s poetic phrases describing something that “is left.” In this case Frost’s words are extracted from a grief-based poem written for her late mother.

“These mounds of shell become emblematic of mortal remains and a parallel theme: ‘where does a creature live, and what does it live in?’ A web? A nest? A shell?,” she said.

The title work, which concludes the book, is a single image of a dead bird held within a folded sheet of paper. Frost’s handwritten words, a poem about death and loss, travel across the white space: “light as air in hand pulse still.”

Read excerpts of commentary on Bindle by Alicia Ostriker and Terri M. Hopkins. (all images courtesy Ricochet Editions.)

— Janet Sassi

Gregory Mahrer and Nancy K. Pearson are the 2014-15 winners of the POL Prize and the Editor’s Prize, respectively. Their manuscripts—Mahrer’s A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent and Pearson’s The Whole by Contemplation of a Single Bone—will be published in the spring of 2016.

“As a reader, I am always looking to be surprised, to be transported by language,” said POL Co-Director and English Professor Elisabeth Frost, PhD, who serves as judge for the Editor’s Prize.

“I always return to Emily Dickinson’s famous description: ‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’ For me, these newest titles in the POL series do just that.”

Mahrer’s book, Frost said, presents a post-apocalyptic society in which the surviving humans must contend with ecological as well as philosophical concerns that emerge in their new world.

“The book stood out immediately for its originality of vision, as well as for the sheer beauty, line to line, of each poem,” she said. “This is not a work of science fiction—it’s more lyrical than that—but reading it, I felt completely immersed in another world.”

Pearson’s “eco-poetics,” meanwhile, addresses issues ranging from addiction to the imprint of slavery on the American landscape by situating the poem’s speaker in relation to the physical landscape, Frost said.

“The voice is personal, intimate, smart—just brilliant,” she said.

In addition to having their books published, Mahrer and Pearson received a prize of $1,000 each and will take part in Fordham’s annual “Voices Up!” performance, an event that commissions composers to set poems to music. Mahrer, Pearson, and the other performers will read their works at the concert on April 16, 2016 at the Lincoln Center campus.

Established in 1999, the POL book prize series selects an unpublished manuscript of poetry from hundreds of entries annually to be published by Fordham University Press. This year’s judge was John Yau, a poet and critic known for such works as The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and Ing Rish (Saturnalia, 2005). The Editor’s Prize was added in 2010.

“These days it’s difficult to get poetry published, let alone really noticed,” Frost said. “Even university presses are under such financial constraints that the number of really good presses with poetry series is diminishing all the time. Contests like the POL Prizes allow the work to be not just published, but distributed.”

This year’s finalists were:

• L. Conrad, A World In Which
• Purvi Shah, Miracle Marks
• Jennifer Willoughby, Beautiful Zero
• Michael Snediker, The New York Editions

Congratulations to three members of Fordham University’s Department of English, who have each published a new volume of poetry—all within a month of each other (more or less).

The authors are Heather Dubrow, Ph.D., John D. Boyd, S.J., Chair in the Poetic Imagination (left), Elisabeth Frost, Ph.D., associate professor of English and Women’s Studies (center), and Janet Kaplan, Fordham’s poet-in-residence (right).

Dubrow’s book, Forms and Hollows (Cherry-Grove Press, 2011), includes poems in a range of forms as well as free verse. Its subjects also range widely, including the death of a parent, the cities of Paris, Sydney, and New York, and the everyday topics of teaching and food (herbs, bread). The publisher states that “Dubrow writes with a quiet, intimate sensibility that hits similar notes whether she is writing a dramatic monologue or a personal lyric.”

You can read more at http://www.cherry-grove.com/dubrow.html

Frost’s debut collection of poetry, All Of Us, (White Pine Press, 2011) is described as “narrative prose poems that explore misfires of communication, gaps in memory, and the simple limitations of language that cause frustration and isolation. The title poem explores a cityscape where community is vertically compressed, and strangers – who are also neighbors – appear eye-to-eye at the peep holes of their locked doors.”

For more on the book visit http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781935210238/default.aspx

Lastly, poet Janet Kaplan has published a third collection of poetry, Dreamlife of a Philanthropist (Notre Dame, 2011), which won the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, sponsored by the creative writing program at Notre Dame.. The poems and sonnets are “packed with postmodern language-leaping, modern irony and absurdity, and a poet’s ageless ear for the pleasures of the lyric and formal experimentation,” the publisher writes. The award is given annually to writers who have published at least one volume of poetry. For more information visit http://undpress.nd.edu/book/P01472

Perhaps these talented poets will show up on Thursday, March 24, when Poets Out Loud hosts its Fordham Faculty Reading at 7 p.m. in the 12th Floor Lounge of Lowenstein Center.

—Janet Sassi