Heidi Reszies

Heidi Reszies is a transdisciplinary artist and poet. In her creative practice she aims to foreground process and materials — where mark-making, impressions, gesture, torn edges, stitches, and brush strokes are a stand-in for the body — in art that expands outward and suggests an underlying structure of time. She works in a variety of media including paint, ceramics, text, and textile. Reszies earned a BA in Dramatic Arts and Studio Art from Mary Washington College and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of the poetry collections Illusory Borders, published by The Operating System (2019), and Of Water & Other Soft Constructions, which was selected by Samiya Bashir as the winner of the 2018 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize for Poetry. Reszies' paintings are included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts CLARA Database of Women Artists. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

OF WATER AND OTHER SOFT CONSTRUCTIONS BY HEIDI RESZIES

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”Wake up,” commands Heidi Reszies, in this fine-spun collection, “we’re here.” Of Water & Other Soft Constructions introduces a poet who can turn her lines like an Olympic luger, getting more out of each breath than you might think she ought. Verbs tense toward now; nouns collectivize the dull promise of universality. An almost-narrative moment begins to form, then refuses us. Find futurity in the way Reszies forevers each line into “incipient bloom,” in how she engages her solemnity of white space through sound and syntax. Recollections become “museum” while “moon phases” are a thing one becomes. Compound images enchant our expectations. The poet shows her work, “a process not a fixed condition,” as analog thread stitching toward the reader’s own location. Is this her magic? In naming her constraints, Reszies activates a kind of liberation that lets us really reckon with what poems can do. —Samiya Bashir, author of Field Theories