Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours

“Bianca Stone is a brilliant transcriber of her generation’s emerging pathology and sensibility. In her work we are propelled along by abrupt changes in perspective and dimension. I have long awaited a manuscript by her that combines her visual talents with her poetry.” – John Ashbery Beautiful mutants, vagabond scuba divers, lovers with disordered gorilla hearts. These poetry comics place the lyric and the grotesque, the elegant and the despondent, side by side in one emotionally intense panel after another. At the vanguard of a movement that embraces our increasingly visual culture and believes poetry has an essential place in that culture, Bianca Stone redefines how we think about poetry, what we expect from comics, and how we interpret our own beautiful mutant lives. Filled with works of radical hybridity, this book erases genre distinctions between the visual and the literary, and offers readers a poetic vision of artistic possibilities. Although reminiscent of illuminations by William Blake, Thomas Phillips’s A Humument, and more recent visual-poetic hybrids by Mary Ruefle and Matthea Harvey, these comics feature a mixture of dreamy expression and absurdist wit that is entirely unique to Bianca Stone. To read her panels is to slip into a watery dreamscape that deepens the longer you look, until you are happy to cavort with the horses and baffled ballerinas that fill her landscapes, to agree, “I was moving like a monsoon through a forest. I was thinking about where I saw myself in two thousand years… And where I saw myself was a tiny subspace ripple sliding through the corridors with a plastic horse in my hand.” This book is just such a subspace ripple. Come on in, the watercolor is fine.