Back Page with J.I. Kleinberg

Artist statement: I live in a place where rain is a refrain. It can be both partner and adversary and always has something to say to our bodies and emotions. This selection of visual poems was suggested by reading and rereading CMarie Fuhrman’s poem “Hells Canyon Revival.” Using the word rain over and over (a refrain!) Furhman’s poem about rain is not a poem about weather. Drawn from an ongoing series of more than 2700 pieces, my found-word collages exploit the accidents of magazine design — the places where, by happenstance, unrelated words stack upon one another or cast unintended meaning across the boundaries of sentence, paragraph, and column break. Each text fragment is the approximate equivalent of a poetic line. The text includes no attributable phrases and the lines that make up each poem are sourced from different magazines.

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 and were featured in a solo exhibit at Peter Miller Books, Seattle, Washington, in May 2022, and displayed at the 2022 Skagit River Poetry Festival and in The Cutting Edge: Art of Collage in Asheville, North Carolina, in April 2023. Chapbooks of her visual poems, how to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books) and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23) were published in 2023 and another, she needs the river, is forthcoming from Poet Atlas.