Author(s): Maureen Alsop

Artists | Poetry

Tender to Empress is a groundbreaking collection of visual poems by Maureen Alsop that fuse visual and written elements into a new means of imagining. Like other goddesses of myth, Alsop works at the crossroads, the place where words give shape to image, where images speak back, and our sense of language expands beyond the page. Crafted under the mechanics of Écriture Feminine, Alsop's visual poems engage an intuitive process that conjures buried incidents from our collective history of violence and longing, into a series of connected vignettes. Within her vivid and complex juxtapositions-warships and birds, horses and women's faces-our orientations toward who we see, and what we see, is made new again. With a luxurious palette of colors, an innovative and often humorous layering of text and archival image, and a poetic voice that never wavers from its vision, Tender to Empress returns us to the sensual pleasures of reading & viewing.