Poems Written in the Midst of Grief

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I've been writing a lot of poetry over the past few years, trying to come to terms with the death of two friends, as well as losses associated with having an autoimmune disease. Writing the poems has been cathartic, but most of them are terrible, or too personal for others to read, or both.

I've also been using studio work to deal with feelings of anxiety and grief, using papers, bookbinding and sewing, combined with damaged and rusty metal I've collected from the local scrapyard. I feel the materials connect well with each other and do somehow express how I've been feeling.

For this piece, I've copied by hand onto eco-printed papers many of my poems written in the midst of grief, then obliterated the words of the poems with machine stitching, leaving only the shapes the words made on the page. I then hand-bound the pages with a bunch of rusty metal wire (that I found in almost this exact configuration), using a modified Coptic binding and waxed linen thread.