curve: bow: body: break:, by Angèle Nyberg

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

curve: bow: body: break: unfolds as a single longform poem—meandering, obsessing, eroding, breathing. The language becomes waterlike, moving with its force, its resistance and release. This chapbook weaves together an autobiographical reflection that is always nearly arriving. Language fails, again and again, leaving behind a persistent “almostness” that becomes the center of the work.

Large things are very small here. The vastness of colonial violence, land and language loss, and grief, become subatomic, even erotic. Braided throughout are fragments of urban ceremony, queer intimacy, and the matrilineal line that holds together everything.

The author draws deep inspiration from and holds gratitude for Joshua Whitehead, Tanya Lukin Linklater, and is directly guided by the form of Michael Wasson’s Testament #90 from his poetry collection Swallowed Light.

Angèle Nyberg is a Chicago based artist and educator, sustained by the lake and the close-knit neighborhood they share with their beautiful partner. Rooted in sensation, their work spans ceramics, metals, words,  weeping, often intertwining the existential and practical concerns of Indigiqueer intimacies, the climate crisis, ceremony, and loss. Angèle tries to visit the lakeside often, in rhythm with their mother, who begins each morning with the river.