Pyre, Derivative (4 of 12)

by Maureen Alsop

[Editor’s Note: Click on the image below to view it at full size.]  

Author’s Note

These drawings evolved from a meditative process in response to my most recent body of poems, Pyre. I began to write (in faded blue, lined notebook) the words and lines from poems in the collection. On several of the pages I re-wrote one or two lines repeatedly, or overlapped poems as writing. On several occasions I wrote from ‘stream of conscious’. As I wrote the words, I would return the pages over time and ‘doodle’ or cross-out or write more words over the first words I’d written. There was no formalised structure to the process other than the consistency of materials (pen, notebook, poems). Later I photographed the poems and created close-ups of the images with the intention of creating a limited edition chapbook of the visual images to accompany the poetry collection at some juncture in the future.

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of Later, Knives & Trees; Mirror Inside Coffin; Mantic; Apparition Wren. She is the winner of several poetry prizes including the Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award through the Hawaii Council for the Humanities, Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. She teaches online with the Poetry Barn.

Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.

Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.

Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.

Submissions

Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.

Upcoming

09/15 • Abbie Doll
09/22 • Karen Regen Tuero
09/29 • Amy Speace
10/06 • Jennifer Edwards
10/13 • Joseph O’Day
10/20 • Carolyn Zaikowski
10/27 • Sunmisola Odusola
11/03 • Sara Cassidy
11/10 • Liz Abrams-Morley
11/17 • Alison Colwell
11/24 • Lucy Zhang
12/01 • TBD
12/08 • TBD
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12/29 • TBD
11/17 • TBD
11/24 • TBD
12/01 • TBD
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