The Color She Gave Gravity

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Womens Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Disability Studies. Movement Studies. Dance. [I]n the slow gestures / of a person adjusting / to too much light and with the faith of a chemist Stephanie Heit sets fire inside her own dark and offers light someone not yet arrived/will understand. THE COLOR SHE GAVE GRAVITY is a breathtaking (which is to say life-giving) book that both stills and energizes by breaking and reforming the unseen bonds of DNA language geography and history.tC Tolbert Stephanie Heits THE COLOR SHE GAVE GRAVITY is a sonorous force field calling on tenderness care vigilance and abandon. An all-encompassing clarity saturates mind spirit movement and emotion. To locate the blind spot and unburden experience of the horizons relentless pressurethis is what the text does tenfold imparting and dispelling the inexplicable along peripheries and in intimately centered frames of movement: gorgeously evocative and intensely realized capacious psychic flows.Brenda Iijima Stephanie Heit has choreographed in her first full-length poetry collection a deeply engaging articulation of the interplay between mental illness and the creative instinct history and destiny and limitation and willful boundary. Here we have an author brave enough to say I suffer and talented enough to excavate the lyrical beauty of that suffering. THE COLOR SHE GAVE GRAVITY offers the reader a textured view of a graceful body torn between trying to remember and trying to forget.Airea D. Matthews In these fierce moving poems we witness a self as it seeks its right path through those landscapes we call world. We are taken along wandering through urban streets or across beaches that once were lakes sometimes dreamily sometimes searingly awake digging through stories and years. These poems enact one of our most potent human gifts: our ability to find ourselves tumbling falling down standing upin proprioceptive relation to everything in our earthly realm.Eleni Sikelianos THE COLOR SHE GAVE GRAVITY traces longing for connection between women. An ecopoetics of the bodymind these poems take us inside a dance inside an imaginary city inside sculpted spaces inside the insomniac body inside sister grief inside she. The work emerges from a landscape of somatic engagement and by experiences of psychiatric systems and multiple hospitalizations. Cover Photo: Crossing Visible by Gwynneth VanLaven