Description: "The imperishable quiet at the heart of form." This quietness to be found by contemplating the photographs of Maude Schuyler Clay was at the heart of Ann Fisher-Wirth's poetic process, which involved listening--listening to the voices that spoke their stories somehow in connection, however oblique, with the photographs. Clay is a seventh-generation Mississippian; Fisher-Wirth has lived there for 30 years, so the images and words represent long, complicated accumulations and recombinations of visual and linguistic experience.
Review Quotes: "Mississippi is a forty-seven-part poem; each part paired with a different photograph... the speaker is a collective consciousness, mostly many specific voices, reminiscent of William Carlos Williams in his epic poem, Paterson... Fisher-Wirth's poems offer us a complex artifact: a palimpsest of human and natural history written on the damaged landscapes we see pictured in each haunting photograph. Through her poems and Clay's photographs we see a deep view of Mississippi that we may have never been able to see... Mississippi is a poem about place; but also, a poem about listening to the palimpsest of voices (the natural and the human) that have lived in that place." --Iris Jamahl Dunkle, http: //poetryflash.org/