Laura Vena
WRITER / ARTIST
PUBLISHED WORK
I.
Our anatomy in mouths, breaths
Vascular language of
Skin Sap Pigment Parchment
Nectared summers
Stuttered on our skin
Without sense, without clover
Sacrum Neck Peeling like eucalyptus bark
Hie-scratched by my movements across you
We vibrate and shed
Husk Carapace Vellum
Clatter of sirens
Our shells, discarded...
SUPER ARROW 5
Autosarcophagy: New Orleans Maps
I lived for five indescribable years in the city of New Orleans, long before the devastation of its flooding following Katrina, but after it had been ravaged by many other catastrophes of both man and nature. I spent my time there navigating its culture, its incongruities, and its streets, voraciously trying to reconcile the chasm between my fantasies of it and the reality I was living, and trying in folly to trace what has been lost. Now and since, I continue that quest when I go back, and from afar, by poring over vintage maps of the city.
ENTROPY MAGAZINE
Interview with Andrew Wessels, writer of A Turkish Dictionary from 1913 Press
FANTASTIC FAILURES IN JODOROWSKY’S DUNE
The Persistent Dreams of Mom and Alejandro Jodorowsky
"In Andrew Wessels’ A Turkish Dictionary, Istanbul is a palimpsest on which the writer seeks to trace the marks left behind—the umbral residue of displaced language and memory, people and cultures that have inhabited this space across time. Positioning himself as witness, historical guide, and poet, Wessels is engaged in the act of recalling what has been lost and what remains still, and in the act of recording his own migrations and memories as he moves through the physical space of the city and the one he encounters through research."
"I am hoping that holding Mom’s copy of Dune in my hands and reading the sparse notes she would have handwritten meticulously with perfectly uniform loops and dips and tails in the margins would somehow bring me closer to understanding something essential about the story, Jodorowsky’s unfinished film, or her.
But now, looking out onto a cityscape of teetering boxes and relics that are triggering an onslaught of memories and nostalgia, I know I’m not up to the task of sifting through it all to find the prize just yet."