Drawn towards the genre-bending nature of her work, its combination of sharp political comment and the exposure of vulnerability, and the way its feminist voice situates itself in a current neoliberal world, we asked American poet and essayist Anne Boyer to present her practice and discussed it with us. At the height of the world pandemic Anne Boyer shared with us her ‘Meditations in an Emergency’. We talked about bodies and/as writing, writing as resistance, and rainbows.
Anne Boyer is an American poet and essayist who has garnered critical attention since her award-winning Garments Against Women (2015). In 2018, she published A Handbook of Disappointed Faith. Her most recent work, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Prior to that she was an inaugural winner of the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2018, and recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and Poetry. Anne Boyer lives in Kansas City.
Ilse van Rijn is a researcher, writer and art historian. Her practice concentrates on the intersection of so-called visual art and writing, rethinking the traditional relationships between the legible and the visible, theory and practice, words and things, culture and nature. Recent research concentrates on the materiality of language in relation to (eco)feminist thought and politics/poetics of resistance. Ilse van Rijn is a tutor at THIRD.