SoFloPoJo Contents: Essays * Interviews * Reviews * Special * Video * Visual Arts * Archives * Calendar * Masthead * SUBMIT * Tip Jar
Kristine Snodgrass, Visual Arts Editor
To have your visual art considered for a future issue please contact [email protected]
To have your visual art considered for a future issue please contact [email protected]
NOVEMBER 2023
GARY BARWIN
MICHAEL SIKKEMA
"This series of vispo is ongoing and collaborative with light, dust, and pollen. Dollar store sticky letters applied to old glass panels that I found in the alley are given a new life as the changing light of day, the accumulation of pollen and dust, and the activity of birds in the cherry tree operate together as an orchestra. The materials do all the work and my job is to notice when it's time to take a picture, and perhaps do a bit of photo editing to reveal more strongly what is there. What started off as a set of three panels has thinned to one, due to breakage and deterioration. The sampling here is a small selection. " - Michael Sikkema
Michael Sikkema lives in West Michigan where he writes and makes poems, vispo, collages, installations, altars, flower gardens, and sound art. He's interested in the tactile, the 4-D, the found, and also in what happens if you just leave things alone.
AUGUST 2023
Cinzia Farina
Creating a space in blackness. Space of doubt and thought. Scattered islands of truth, break streaks of inky black, with holes and smears, swirls and blots, on black newspaper ink... ― Cinzia Farina
Cinzia Farina, former Art History teacher and journalist, was born and lives in Enna (Italy). She has illustrated children's books, conducted reading and writing workshops, creative reuse of waste materials and unconventional production of clothes, furniture, objects. From the figurative leanings of her youthful years, she moved on to gradually more abstract and conceptual choices, to visual poetry, the artist's book, assemblage and installation. Member of Iuoma, she is active in the worldwide mail art circuit. Her works are featured in group exhibitions of Visual Poetry (Brazil, Serbia, France, Argentina, Italy, Spain, Portugal), artist's books (Italy, Romania, Hungary, Spain), contemporary art (Italy, Poland, France), in private collections and national and international archives, in specialized journals (including Vitruvius, Illustrati, ffoom, Aura poesia visual, El Humo, Procedimentum, Nuire, Carie, Frequenze Poetiche, Utsanga, Sonicboomjournal, Nyugat Plusz, Civico 23, Dia Logue), in Zines made in Chile, Germany, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Mexico, U. S.A., South Africa. Among Farina's most recent publications (besides children's books): AA.VV. Scritture, edited by Claudio Romeo, Miniprint Edizioni (2018); Teoria del colore, with Claudio Romeo, Miniprint Edizioni (2019); AA.VV. CollaborAzioni, Vol.1 (2019), and Vol. 2 (2020), edited by Claudio Romeo, MiniPrint Edizioni; Sul fondo del bianco. Cinque Verbovisuali, Bertoni Edizione (2021), edited by G. Moio; Judith. Women Making Visual Poetry, Timglaset Editions, Ottawa (2021), edited by Amanda Earl; Waave Global Gallery, Hysterical books, USA (2021), edited by Kristine Snodgrass; AA.VV. "Tra parole e immagini /Testi creativi" in Frequenze poetiche, edited by Giorgio Moio (2022); Source, Redfoxpress, Ireland (2023).
Kristen Szumyn
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Kristen Szumyn is a self-taught visual poet currently based in Sydney, Australia. Her work is a deeply personal response to having been raised within a patriarchal, fear-based,
doomsday cult which adherents refer to as ‘The Truth.’ Kristen’s glitched visual poetry, using the technique of databending, challenges the idea of a singular narrative or ultimate truth by exploring themes of fragmented information, dissolved meaning, subversive interruptions, deliberate data corruption, and forced errors that create digital artifacts. Drawing also upon her background as an ancient Greek historian/classicist with a special interest in fragmentary ancient texts, Kristen incorporates elements of asemic writing and experimental print making using found objects into her databending, creating pieces that allude towards partially reconstructed ancient cosmologies; mapping out the regions of the underworld, measuring immeasurable worlds with imagined equations, capturing field recordings of songs and sounds long lost, and discovering almost-poems composed of fragile, fragmented, impossible languages. |
Karla Van Vliet
Series: Timbre
Expression is like a bird flapping around inside me. Painting, asemics, and poetry are how I let that bird out to fly into the world. Or at least fly out of me and onto the page.
Asemic writing, for me, is the gesture of writing, a way of expressing what has not yet found voice in word but needs speaking. It keeps my hand in the practice of writing and is a place I can express my internal experience in that transitory realm between image and defined language.
These pieces are extractions of asemics from earlier explorations, digitized replications. They are a continued dialogue with prior expressions. This extension of the conversation pushes my work from the analog system of pen and ink on paper into the digital realm.
Expression is like a bird flapping around inside me. Painting, asemics, and poetry are how I let that bird out to fly into the world. Or at least fly out of me and onto the page.
Asemic writing, for me, is the gesture of writing, a way of expressing what has not yet found voice in word but needs speaking. It keeps my hand in the practice of writing and is a place I can express my internal experience in that transitory realm between image and defined language.
These pieces are extractions of asemics from earlier explorations, digitized replications. They are a continued dialogue with prior expressions. This extension of the conversation pushes my work from the analog system of pen and ink on paper into the digital realm.
Karla Van Vliet’s newest books are She Speaks in Tongues (Anhinga Press,) a collection of poems and asemic writings, and Fluency: A Collection of Asemic Writings (Shanti Arts.) Her books From the Book of Remembrance and The River From My Mouth, collections of poetry and paintings, are published by Shanti Arts, and her poem length chapbook, Fragments: From the Lost Book of the Bird Spirit, is published by Folded Word.
She is the winner of the 2022 Global Excellence Award: Poet & Artist of the Year, and the winner of the Bacopa Literary Review’s Visual Poetry Award. She has been a finalist for the Tupelo Press’s Sunken Garden, and Snowbound chapbook prizes. She is a Forward Prize, a three-time Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net, nominee. Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Poet Lore, Green Mountains Review, Crannog Magazine, and others.
Van Vliet’s paintings have been featured in WAAVe Global Anthology, Women Asemic Writers, UTSANGA.IT, Still Point Art Quarterly, Stone Voices Magazine, Champlain’s Lake Rediscovered, and Gate Posts with No Gate: The Leg Paint Project. She is a member of WAAVe Global (Women Asemic Artists & Visual Poets) and Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate.
She is a co-founder and editor of deLuge Journal, and founder of Van Vliet Gallery. Van Vliet has her MFA in Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Instagram: karlavanvliet
Facebook: Karla Van Vliet
www.vanvlietarts.com
She is the winner of the 2022 Global Excellence Award: Poet & Artist of the Year, and the winner of the Bacopa Literary Review’s Visual Poetry Award. She has been a finalist for the Tupelo Press’s Sunken Garden, and Snowbound chapbook prizes. She is a Forward Prize, a three-time Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net, nominee. Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Poet Lore, Green Mountains Review, Crannog Magazine, and others.
Van Vliet’s paintings have been featured in WAAVe Global Anthology, Women Asemic Writers, UTSANGA.IT, Still Point Art Quarterly, Stone Voices Magazine, Champlain’s Lake Rediscovered, and Gate Posts with No Gate: The Leg Paint Project. She is a member of WAAVe Global (Women Asemic Artists & Visual Poets) and Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate.
She is a co-founder and editor of deLuge Journal, and founder of Van Vliet Gallery. Van Vliet has her MFA in Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Instagram: karlavanvliet
Facebook: Karla Van Vliet
www.vanvlietarts.com
MAY 2023
A short series that obliterates the phrase into a visual bandwidth of jettisoned letter fragments and receivable material. The poetics are tucked in molecular, and even cellular, quadrants of a movable writing field. The viewer is asked to tune in, unravel and ingest the signal. The listener is required to focus, distinguish and place themselves into the landscape both metaphorically and with the book pushed up against their eye socket.
Nico Vassilakis is a visual and textual poet. His recent books include VOIR DIRE (Dusie Press 2020) and LETTERS of INTENT (CyberWit 2022) along with other pamphlets and booklets. Nico is a contributing editor for UTSANGA and has had his work exhibited globally. He lives in the middle of nowhere in Illinois with his wife and animals.
Nico Vassilakis is a visual and textual poet. His recent books include VOIR DIRE (Dusie Press 2020) and LETTERS of INTENT (CyberWit 2022) along with other pamphlets and booklets. Nico is a contributing editor for UTSANGA and has had his work exhibited globally. He lives in the middle of nowhere in Illinois with his wife and animals.
Click below to download & view Nico Vassilakis artwork pdf
| nico_vassilakis_fer_kristine_2.pdf |
Mark Bloch is a pan-media artist and writer. He is the author of the book Robert Delford Brown: Meat, Maps, and Militant Metaphysics. He has also written about art for The Brooklyn Rail, Paper Magazine, New Observations, Whitehot Magazine and ABCNews.com. His artwork has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. New York University’s Fales Library houses the PAN (Postal Art Network) Archive, a vast collection of Bloch’s papers, including mail art and related ephemera.
This series of visual poetry emerged effortlessly in the summer of 2012. I started writing and making art in journals and sketchbooks at age 17 which was in 1973, 50 years ago. Since then I’ve used hand-lettering as performance-therapy to think out loud in real time calligraphy that invites me to highlight and push on patterns, ideas and meta-meanings hidden in the shapes and sounds that rise out of empty spaces that the words bubble up from and seem to occupy. I’ve embraced visual poetry and Letterisme since 1977 when I joined the international mail art network.
FEBRUARY 2023
Amanda Earl
The Vispo Bible is a life’s work begun in 2015 to translate the Bible into visual poetry. It is a defiant feminist work that deconstructs misogynist, homophobic, and racist texts and its literal interpretations, which have often been used for violence and oppression.
The work is also a celebration of art, especially the work of women, and a whimsical counterpart to such uses of the Bible and takes its place among the creative works that have been made in response, especially texts such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. I learned about numerous contemporary women artists while researching Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2021) and these women and subsequent anthology, WAAVE Global Gallery (Hysterical Books, 2021), along with the members of the Women Asemic Writers and Visual Poets group on Facebook, run by our darling editor, Kristine Snodgrass, have been inspiring and influential for my own visual poetry. Meg Hitchcock works with sacred texts and illuminated manuscripts; Linda Ekstrom alters and transforms the Bible into sculptures, and Carol P. Kunstadt uses the Old Testament to make gorgeous works of art.
To date, I have made 372 visual poems from 16 books of the Old and New Testaments, King James Version.
The pieces published here are from 2 Corinthians, Chapters 3, 4, 5, 9 and 13. I can’t say why I chose purple and gold as the colours for this work, other than to say that my synaesthesia may have played a role. I recently made a long hybrid work entitled PURPLE. Purple, for me, is the colour of mourning, but also luxury with its royal associations. The dye was originally made from the mucus of snail shells. I have just gone down the rabbit hole of purple, pulling down some of the books I own on colour: The Secondary Colors by Alexander Theroux, The Secret Lives of Colour by Kaisia St. Clair, but I’m going to stop here because I can spend eons on colour.
There’s something rare and beautiful about purple, in all its shades. Seems like a good way to start off 2023.
More information about background, publications and process of the Vispo Bible is available at https://eleanorincognito.blogspot.com/search?q=VISPO+BIBLE
The work is also a celebration of art, especially the work of women, and a whimsical counterpart to such uses of the Bible and takes its place among the creative works that have been made in response, especially texts such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. I learned about numerous contemporary women artists while researching Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2021) and these women and subsequent anthology, WAAVE Global Gallery (Hysterical Books, 2021), along with the members of the Women Asemic Writers and Visual Poets group on Facebook, run by our darling editor, Kristine Snodgrass, have been inspiring and influential for my own visual poetry. Meg Hitchcock works with sacred texts and illuminated manuscripts; Linda Ekstrom alters and transforms the Bible into sculptures, and Carol P. Kunstadt uses the Old Testament to make gorgeous works of art.
To date, I have made 372 visual poems from 16 books of the Old and New Testaments, King James Version.
The pieces published here are from 2 Corinthians, Chapters 3, 4, 5, 9 and 13. I can’t say why I chose purple and gold as the colours for this work, other than to say that my synaesthesia may have played a role. I recently made a long hybrid work entitled PURPLE. Purple, for me, is the colour of mourning, but also luxury with its royal associations. The dye was originally made from the mucus of snail shells. I have just gone down the rabbit hole of purple, pulling down some of the books I own on colour: The Secondary Colors by Alexander Theroux, The Secret Lives of Colour by Kaisia St. Clair, but I’m going to stop here because I can spend eons on colour.
There’s something rare and beautiful about purple, in all its shades. Seems like a good way to start off 2023.
More information about background, publications and process of the Vispo Bible is available at https://eleanorincognito.blogspot.com/search?q=VISPO+BIBLE
Amanda Earl (she/her) is a pansexual polyamorous feminist writer, visual poet, editor and publisher who lives on the traditional unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin People. Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca, editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, Sweden, 2021) and fallen angel of AngelHousePress. She is the author of over thirty chapbooks and four works with spines, Trouble (Hem Press, UK, 2022), Genesis (Timglaset Editions, Sweden, 2022), Kiki (Chaudiere Books, Canada, 2014; Invisible Publishing, Canada, 2019) and Coming Together Presents Amanda Earl (Coming Together, USA, 2014). Through her press, AngelHousePress she published an erotic novella in 2014 entitled A World of Yes and will publish her poetry collection, Beast Body Epic in 2023. The Vispo Bible is a life’s work begun in 2015 to translate the Bible into visual poetry. To date Earl has made 373 visual poems from 20 books of The old and new testaments. Earl’s creative missions are exploration, whimsy and connection with kindred misfits. AmandaEarl.com https://linktr.ee/amandaearl
Serse Luigetti
NOVEMBER 2022
J.I. Kleinberg
An artist, poet, and freelance writer, J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg. Her visual poems have been published in print and online journals worldwide, including Atlas & Alice, Diagram, Explorations in Media Ecology, Full Bleed, The Indianapolis Review, and Otoliths. Her visual poems were featured in a solo exhibit, orchestrated light, at Peter Miller Books, Seattle, Washington, in May 2022, and displayed at the Skagit River Poetry Festival in October 2022.
Carol Lynne Knight
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a blank page
glowing with a bonfire of play and dash, could be red or purple. the brush today is ragged and roaming. the palette is a circle of endless triads. transparency sifts clouds and shadows the page for lovers to overlay. my fingers slip and draw the perfect line. I try again and fail, undo, try again and love the curve, the loops, and tails. |
CAROL LYNNE KNIGHT is co-director of Anhinga Press. Since 1992, she has edited and designed more than 100 literary publications for the press. She is the author of three books of poetry, A Fretted Terrain, Like Mars (Apalachee Press), Quantum Entanglement (Apalachee Press), and If I Go Missing (Fernwood Press). Her poetry has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, The Ledge, Slipstream, Comstock Review, Redactions, So to Speak, Rivet, and others. In her prose life, she has finished drafts of four novels about 1960s teenage life in Dade County, Fla. She is a graduate of the University of Miami and Florida State University. She taught college studio classes in digital art and has exhibited digital prints, video, and pottery. She also has worked as a copy writer and graphic designer. She lives in Tallahassee, Fla.
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AUGUST 2022
Lova Delis
Published artist and poet, Lova Delis, is self-taught and creates from her studio in Dayton, Ohio. She began at an early age with painting, collage, and spoken word poetry. In recent years, she has also pursued visual poetry and performance art. Her current work is focused on abstract paintings and collage that question consensus reality, and other issues such as colonialism, sex, class, tools, and technology. In her free time, you can find her baking bread or in the garden with her cats and dogs.
Published artist and poet, Lova Delis, is self-taught and creates from her studio in Dayton, Ohio. She began at an early age with painting, collage, and spoken word poetry. In recent years, she has also pursued visual poetry and performance art. Her current work is focused on abstract paintings and collage that question consensus reality, and other issues such as colonialism, sex, class, tools, and technology. In her free time, you can find her baking bread or in the garden with her cats and dogs.
analog glitch 10
analog glitch 1 analog glitch 2 analog glitch 5
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This “Analog Glitch” series represents a deconstruction of relationships. Between historical and contemporary, analog and digital. When reality is reframed with such juxtapositions, we have access to a new or refreshed perspective if we allow it. These works encourage the viewer to question the complex position of an individual, which lies behind the choices we make in each of our daily lives.
At left: analog glitch 7. At right: analog glitch 8 |
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May 2022
Angela Caporaso
Angela Caporaso was born in 1962. A visual artist from Caserta (Italy), she began to take an interest in figurative arts in the eighties, exhibiting repeatedly both in Italy and abroad. Angela Caporaso's art has always been characterized by a constant research and experimentation.
Since her first exhibitions she has revealed a constant strain towards new expressive languages. This constant research led Angela to contaminate sign with colour, font with image, literature with painting, as though one single medium was not sufficient to express her complex imaginative world. She has worked on the words of the main contemporary writers and has dedicated some of her exhibitions to Albert Camus, Emily Dickinson, Pier Vittorio Tondelli. Influenced by Pop Art, she has inserted in her works the typical comics “bubbles”, as well as advertising references, decontextualized and transformed into a proper artistic language. She has worked with unrecyclable waste material, humble and inert, which has acquired new sense and meaning thanks to the artist’s intervention. Angela Caporaso focusing on artists books and visual poetry, working with the mediums of collage, trash-art and, more recently, digital format. Many of her works are part of both public and private collections.
Since her first exhibitions she has revealed a constant strain towards new expressive languages. This constant research led Angela to contaminate sign with colour, font with image, literature with painting, as though one single medium was not sufficient to express her complex imaginative world. She has worked on the words of the main contemporary writers and has dedicated some of her exhibitions to Albert Camus, Emily Dickinson, Pier Vittorio Tondelli. Influenced by Pop Art, she has inserted in her works the typical comics “bubbles”, as well as advertising references, decontextualized and transformed into a proper artistic language. She has worked with unrecyclable waste material, humble and inert, which has acquired new sense and meaning thanks to the artist’s intervention. Angela Caporaso focusing on artists books and visual poetry, working with the mediums of collage, trash-art and, more recently, digital format. Many of her works are part of both public and private collections.
Selected exhibitions
1999 : “Le mille Emily “ Solo Exhibition Homage to Emily Dickinson, with a presentation by Luigi Romolo Carrino. Limatola (BN) - Italy
2002 : “Tondelli Imperfetti” Solo Exhibition Homage to Pier Vittorio Tondelli - Tenax, Florence, with an interview with author by Marino Sinibaldi for Fahrenheit - Radio3
2007 : "Kauffmann 0.7...trash art" Solo Exhibition for The Bicentennial of Angelica Kauffmann's death - Palazzo Fazio, Capua (CE) . Catalogue by Associazione Anna Jervolino, Caserta - Italy
2008 : "Nuova Voce-La Fiera del levante adotta Telethon" Collective Exhibitions curated by Fondazione Giorgio Correggiari - Fiera del Levante di Bari - Italy
2012 : "Between the second and third millennium" retrospective (anthological) exhibition of Angela Caporaso - Bourbon Military Quarter, Casagiove (Ce ) - Italy
2013 : “Di Carta/Papermade” Collective Exhibitions of Artist's Book curated by Valeria Bertesina - Museo Civico Palazzo Fogazzaro, Schio (VI), Italy.
2016 : “Verbal Glasses” Solo Exhibition of Visual Poetry - Frammenti d’Arte Monteverde Vecchio, Rome - Italy . Catalog published by Youcanprint - presentation by Maurizio Spatola (collaboration by Monica Olivieri).
2017 : “1cartolinaXmagritte” Collective Exhibition curated by Tania Sofia Lorandi - Oratorio di Santo Stefano, Casalmaggiore (CR ) - Italy
2018 : “Oggetto Libro / Book Object” Collective Exhibitions of Artist's Book curated by Susanna Vallebona - Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milano - Italy
2020 : “Lettere S.com.Poste” Collective Exhibitions curated by Duccio Scheggi - Michela Mascarucci - Galleria della Fondazione Il Bisonte, Florence - Italy
2020 : “IoTuNoi-Add&Return” Collective Exhibition of Artist's Book curated by Lamberto Caravita - Museo CABA - Dart Villa Verlicchi , Lavezzola (RA) - Italy
2021: “Alphabet in Decay" International Exhibition of Visual Poetry Beyond Language curated by Timglaset Editions - Etkbooks Gallery, Bern - Switzerland
1999 : “Le mille Emily “ Solo Exhibition Homage to Emily Dickinson, with a presentation by Luigi Romolo Carrino. Limatola (BN) - Italy
2002 : “Tondelli Imperfetti” Solo Exhibition Homage to Pier Vittorio Tondelli - Tenax, Florence, with an interview with author by Marino Sinibaldi for Fahrenheit - Radio3
2007 : "Kauffmann 0.7...trash art" Solo Exhibition for The Bicentennial of Angelica Kauffmann's death - Palazzo Fazio, Capua (CE) . Catalogue by Associazione Anna Jervolino, Caserta - Italy
2008 : "Nuova Voce-La Fiera del levante adotta Telethon" Collective Exhibitions curated by Fondazione Giorgio Correggiari - Fiera del Levante di Bari - Italy
2012 : "Between the second and third millennium" retrospective (anthological) exhibition of Angela Caporaso - Bourbon Military Quarter, Casagiove (Ce ) - Italy
2013 : “Di Carta/Papermade” Collective Exhibitions of Artist's Book curated by Valeria Bertesina - Museo Civico Palazzo Fogazzaro, Schio (VI), Italy.
2016 : “Verbal Glasses” Solo Exhibition of Visual Poetry - Frammenti d’Arte Monteverde Vecchio, Rome - Italy . Catalog published by Youcanprint - presentation by Maurizio Spatola (collaboration by Monica Olivieri).
2017 : “1cartolinaXmagritte” Collective Exhibition curated by Tania Sofia Lorandi - Oratorio di Santo Stefano, Casalmaggiore (CR ) - Italy
2018 : “Oggetto Libro / Book Object” Collective Exhibitions of Artist's Book curated by Susanna Vallebona - Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milano - Italy
2020 : “Lettere S.com.Poste” Collective Exhibitions curated by Duccio Scheggi - Michela Mascarucci - Galleria della Fondazione Il Bisonte, Florence - Italy
2020 : “IoTuNoi-Add&Return” Collective Exhibition of Artist's Book curated by Lamberto Caravita - Museo CABA - Dart Villa Verlicchi , Lavezzola (RA) - Italy
2021: “Alphabet in Decay" International Exhibition of Visual Poetry Beyond Language curated by Timglaset Editions - Etkbooks Gallery, Bern - Switzerland
Bibliography
2011 : Tra secondo e terzo millennio – Opere in catalogo di Angela Caporaso. Monographic catalogue - 50 pages - col. ill. - 20 x 30 cm - Ed. Amande. This publication presents a selection of works produced between 1993 and 2011. 2013 Le Printemps - artist’s book by Angela Caporaso ed. Amande, published in May 2013, centenary of the first performance of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps ((Paris – May 1913) printed in numbered edition in a limited printing of 25 copies signed by the artist and numbered from 1 to 25 . A literary contribution of Silvia Longo. 2014 : Angela Caporaso’s visual poetry chapbooks - Dan Warner's "This is Visual Poetry" series, USA. 2016 : “Occhiali verbali” published by Youcanprint – Italy; curated by Maurizio Spatola (collaboration by Monica Olivieri). 2021 “Sul fondo del bianco. 5 poete verbovisuali” Bertoni Editore - Italy ; preface by Stefano Taccone. The volume is edited by Giorgio Moio. 2022 : “The Relationships” Timglaset Editions - Malmö, Sweden ; "Il Dubbio" Gap Riot Press – Toronto, Canada http://www.angelacaporaso.com/ PAURE
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