This week we’re taking a peek at Poetry Comics: from the Book of Hours by Bianca Stone. Published in 2016 in Warrensburg, Missouri by Pleiades Press, this 79-page collection of Stone’s work stretches the comic medium in a series of intimate and emotionally raw illustrations and panels. Poetry comics (a hybrid, experimental form of both mediums that can be seen in the work of artists such as Julie Delporte, Sommer Browning, and Anders Brekhus Nilsen among others) draw "from the syntax of comics, images, panels, speech balloons, and so on, in order to produce a literary or artistic experience akin to that of traditional poetry." As an unvarnished autobiographical comic with feminist undertones, it is in the lineage of artists like Aline Kominsky-Crumb. But Stone’s poetic approach, which informs her artistic style as well as her writing, injects an unruly tone of existential grappling that echos the illustrations and text of artists more akin to William Blake.
Pleiades Press is based at the University of Central Missouri. Bianca Stone's work has been published in magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Nation. Her poetry collection What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022) won the 2023 Vermont Book Award in Poetry. Her other books include The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018) and Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014). In 2012 she collaborated with Anne Carson to illustrate her translation of Antigonick.
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