Here's the incredible painting, paper and photographs (MRIs of my brain) and oil on canvas, in all its glory, that became the cover of my chapbook, by artist Shee Gomes. I got a CD (! - all I could get at the time) of my MRI images, uploaded them, and Shee converted them into a format she could use. She then printed and cut out many many, many brains. By hand. Shee read my collection and selected the colors and created the image based on the pieces. It was and still is a dream, both in the collaborative process and the final image that resulted. The cover of the collection feels as if it grew organically out of the collection, and the poems, too, were formed by this cover, as I was revising and editing them at the same time the cover art was coming together. Shee's work inspired me and encouraged me (as did
@mspicone , my editor at
@chestnutreview and also a visual artist) to continue experimenting with the form of my poems so they reflect an embodied experience of migraine for me, and in terms of their materiality: just as the cover art is composed in part of actual pictures of my brain, so are some of the poems and pieces in this collection actual artifacts of living with migraine: disability assessments, MyChart aftervisit summary notes, ads for migraine remedies, etc. Thank you again, Shee, for your generosity and this gorgeous and utterly original piece of art that served as both linchpin and cornerstone of my collection!
Here's Shee's website: .br/ full of her body of work on the body!
