Silk is compatible with body tissues; our immune system accepts it on surfaces as sensitive as the human brain. In conjunction with Tufts University’s cutting edge research on liquefied silk, Jen Bervin mixes poetry with medical technology in the form of a silk bio-sensor. Silk Poems explores the cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities of silk written nanoscale inside the body.
Bervin’s poem stems from the belief that reading such a sensor inside the body is not a neutral context, rather one pre-inscribed with concern, written in a material with a 5,000 year old international history. In her research, Bervin consulted over thirty international bioengineering labs, textile archives, medical libraries, and sericulture sites in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
The book was named a 2017 “Book of the Year” by New Museum, and was a finalist for a LAMBDA Literary Award and a CLMP Firecracker Award. Silk Poems premiered in 2016 at MASS MoCA in the yearlong exhibition Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder and is supported by a grant from Creative Capital.
Advance praise for Silk Poems:
“So what have we here? We have an artist who takes everything a woman ever did and turns it into an example of the world. She makes ordinary poems written on paper seem mundane and archaic, as if they were scratching the surface which, literally, they are. Her work—all of it—engages the eye, the hand, the ear, and the mind. Her artistry is vast and inclusive, by finesse and intelligence, by curiosity, forbearance, and vision. She knows the unexpected wonder of pattern is everywhere, and that the smallest detail contains enough energy to spawn a universe. I think they should send her into space, if it were not for the fact her work has already sent us there. Her poems in themselves, those exhilarated fragments, are the purest form of the art itself—they contain the innate inner gradients of whatever takes our breath away. She makes me shiver. I don’t know how she does it but she does, and I feel privileged to have been alive on earth while she was doing it.”
—Mary Ruefle
“Read Jen Bervin’s fascinating Silk Poems one hundred times and you will be given one hundred gifts. A first reading draws the mother silkworm as a metaphor for creativity and resilience. Another reading reveals an elegant letter to Infinity. This sensational book addresses both the past and the future; art and science; the earth and the stars. Everywhere Silk Poems is in incomparable conversation with us.”
—Terrance Hayes
“This beautiful multi-disciplinary text becomes a meditation on desire and embodiment, on cultural and personal transformation, on the genetic coding of language and the enduring connection of poetic practice to other forms of making.”
—Elizabeth Willis
“Two filaments of silk combine to form a single thread. In poems of delicate beauty Bervin inventories multiple strands of a 5,000-year legacy spun from the carapace of a silkworm. To read is to inhabit the continuous reeling of an ancient insect / human tale and to emerge forever changed.”
—Ann Hamilton