Witek, Terri: Something's Missing in This Museum

Anhinga, paperback

Publication Date: February 10, 2023

Publisher Marketing: When texts about paintings try to reach each other across space, pages that query how we experience art become poetic experiments in seeing/reading. What clings to what on these page walls? And do paintings from other centuries (older materialities, differently-moving) themselves re-make each other through their almost touch? Are we momentarily part of a painting when we consider such things? And what's the changing position of the museum which poses us by country, by technique, by year and by foot pattern? In Something's Missing in This Museum, the subjects are love, torture, transaction and time.  

Terri Witek is the author of seven previous books of poetry and has been featured in the anthologies: JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (2021), and in the WAAVe Global Gallery of Women's Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry (2021). Her many collaborations with artists and writers have been featured in performances, museum shows, and gallery exhibitions. Witek teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University's MFA of the Americas with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes, and their work together is represented by the liminal in Valencia, Spain.   "You're in for a walloping good time with Terri Witek's 'Something's Missing in This Museum.' Sure, she goes to the Louvre, but not one you've ever visited. Ekphrasis never had it so wild and so accurate with paintings that 'bestrange us earthers, / cog in certain civic fears.' Earlier 'phones flash their ten-secondside chapels.' This is the end of 'Vermeer:' 'You look away, light – light wounds.' Perfect. She imagines 'the sexual smell of night remountained' and 'what water looks like to water as interpreted by 8 black ribbons.' So good. 'Let's cabinet this,' she writes. We will." - Terese Svoboda "What's a museum for? Some people say they are not only spaces for contemplation and dialogue but also for use and abuse. Probably not since the famous and curious race through the Louvre staged by Jean-Luc Godard in his film, 'Bande à part,' have we seen such a challenging and provocative approach to what a museum should be used for. Terri Witek's poems aim precisely at that, and like an intense and risky journey through art history, they reveal the gaps our ways of seeing create, either by omission or neglect. What's the political utility of art? Can art heal the original wound of the world, which is also its very origin? If this world works by amazement, then Terri Witek's poems should be mandatory reading." - Carlos Soto Román