Karla Van Vliet

Karla Van Vliet is the author of From the Book of Remembrance and The River From My Mouth, collections of poetry and paintings, Fluency: A Collection of Asemic Writings, published by Shanti Arts, and a poem length chapbook, Fragments: From the Lost Book of the Bird Spirit, published by Folded Word.///Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Poet Lore, The Tishman Review, Green Mountains Review, Crannog Magazine, and many others. She is an Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize finalist, and a three-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee.///Her paintings have been featured in Women Asemic Writers, UTSANGA.IT, Still Point Art Quarterly, Stone Voices Magazine, Champlain’s Lake Rediscovered, and Gate Posts with No Gate: The Leg Paint Project. She is a member of WAAVe Global (Women Asemic Artists & Visual Poets) and Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate. ///She is a co-founder and editor of deLuge Journal, an Integrative Dreamwork analyst, artist, and founder of Van Vliet Gallery. She lives in Vermont, USA.

SHE SPEAKS TONGUES BY KARLA VAN VLIET
$22.00

Excerpt:

When we talk about the river, we should talk about the heron
whose long wings lay shadow across the sandy bank, how
the bird’s heft rides air above the water. How
like grief, wings spread.

SHE SPEAKS TONGUES BY KARLA VAN VLIET $22.00

Includes 25 dynamic asemic paintings by Karla Van Vliet

Poet and visual artist Karla van Vliet’s bold, inspiring, and mediative new book, She Speaks Tongues, is in the great traditions of asemic writing, abstract and surrealist art, calligraphy and graffiti, Zen and American pastoral poetry. In this collection Van Vliet enacts how the art of the line (visual and poetic), like Mirtha Dermisache’s “Libro No 1,” is part of our aesthetic intuition, where we create meaning from the known and unknown spaces of our “blessings and despair.” These pages, illuminated by the power of the great spirit, are where “the wind sings into every torn and ragged place in my body.” Hers is a tender poetry that takes the landscape into the great thunder of meaning where “plums like words” suffice in a world here “your absence was an orchard.” She Speaks Tongues is a kind of creation myth for our time. In this book I find solace and grace and a great generous spirit.
— Elizabeth A.I. Powell, author of Atomizer and Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter

“I came to this river like I was coming home,” writes Karla Van Vliet in She Speaks Tongues. That describes the way I come to Van Vliet’s poetry and art. “Home” here is more mood than place, more symbol than certainty, but for a fleeting moment on each page of She Speaks Tongues, you will find (or feel) it. In poems verbal and visual, in psalm, song, sign, and sigh, Karla Van Vliet offers us the many names of home.

— Jean LeBlanc, poet and asemic artist, author of Ancient Songs of Us