My poems can make a difference!

Poet Bio: AKaiser's work has appeared or will appear in ROAR!; Temenos Journal; Coldnoon: Travel Poetics; Amsterdam Quarterly & Amsterdam Quarterly Yearbook 2015 and CrossWinds Poetry Journal. Her poem, "At the speed of light, squared," was a finalist in the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2014 and can be read at www.wasafiri.org. In 2015, AKaiser was invited to JIWAR, an artists' and researchers' residency in urban creativity in Spain, obtained her MFA with Carlow University (US/Ireland) and read at the Guild Complex, Chicago. She has been a resident at Brushcreek Foundation for the Arts in Wyoming. AKaiser curates a bi-annual poetry reading series in partnership with Station Independent Projects art gallery in NYC. She translates French, Spanish, and Catalan, and is currently working on the writings of Cebrià de Montoliu, a city planner and the first translator of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass into Catalan.

Author Statement: My writing takes a critical view of social, political and cultural issues. In my work, I aim towards the deconstruction of received ideas of identities and democracies. I have been lucky to have lived years among different cultures, I am familiar with other languages, and know this is part and parcel of the persistent calling into question I try to practice.

Having engaged subjects as diverse as the birth of the American industrial revolution, place, displacement, emigration and empathy with nature – bodies of water, shells, the human body - my work pushes and pulls on conceived boundaries, attempting to arrange images and ideas to express some perspectives on our multi-faceted world.

I am an ekphrastic magpie and, as a norm, find inspiration and engage in conversation with other arts – for better or for worse, all open to my sometimes rather "cubist" reinterpretation. Additionally, I have been a Jungian student for most of my life and welcome the mystic, dreams, and the role the unconscious plays in our lives and art.

For my mixed genre pieces, I employ approaches from Eastern and Western poetics, found text in dialogue, letters, pop culture, historical and scientific writings. I hear this orchestra of varied genres as a cacophonic symphony of independent voices finding their way into my perambulatory creations. I also take some photos along the way.

For this month with Tupelo Press's 30/30 Project, I aim to take advantage of a slowdown I am forced to submit to (endure?) and observe more closely minutiae around me, but that can easily be brushed over with assumption in the course of lives where we are often juggling multiple interior-scapes, as well as other outside world roles and projects.

Additional inspiration for this idea comes from George Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris as well as Marguerite Duras' use of quiet blank space. I hope to bring into focus what we might otherwise overlook, the way Georgia O'Keefe's expanded flowers have us see them as if for the first time, or how Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present stills us so we can reconsider the experience of silence, together.

Your support gives me vital inspiration as I write for thirty days this month.

Tupelo Press provides the canvas, I bring my words, accompanied by other fine poets, writing thirty poems in thirty days, all ours to edit and submit as we wish. 30/30 poems have been taken by over 90 journals and featured in over 40 published chapbooks, all so Tupelo Press can keep publishing exquisite and diverse voices that might never be heard otherwise.

Every dollar gives me confidence to write more, and helps the press place more poems in gorgeous books. Help me to help this distinguished press. Give today!