Zigzagging lines draw your eye through this kaleidoscope visual poem of natural and diagrammatic imagery. One of her many experiments with symmetry and synecdoche, "oleander 7" is by repeat Blasted Tree contributor Catherine Vidler. An edition of sixty 4.75” x 4.25” leaflets featuring the floral poem have been produced on glossy photo paper set into card stock covers. “oleander 7” can be viewed online and copies of the leaflet are in The Blasted Tree Store.
Poetry Chapbook - What the Barn Can't Kill by Jerrod Schwarz
Within a body of agribusiness texts — abattoir equipment manuals, butchery textbooks, and rancher’s almanacs — lie the bones of a slaughterhouse poetics. In What the Barn Can’t Kill, Jerrod Schwarz extracts those bones through a process of digital erasure, revealing a haunting collection of visual poems, hidden until now behind a locked barn door. The Blasted Tree has published a limited edition of sixty chapbooks printed on recycled newsprint paper and bound in hand-stamped covers, each one unique. View the collection in the gallery below, chapbooks can be found in our online store.
VIEW WHAT THE BARN CAN’T KILL
Poetry Artist Print - Book1 by Ramsey Hedayat
After a short conversation regarding visual poetry, asemic writing, and using computers to generate material for art, Ramsey Hedayat, accountant by trade, produced a spreadsheet that generates page-fulls of 8bit-looking lines of pseudotext. Using nothing but a random integer formula and conditional cell formatting, Hedayat’s spreadsheet can spit out a near-infinite number of unique pages. The Blasted Tree has produced a limited edition of 40 signed and numbered artist prints, each featuring a one-of-a-kind visual poem from “Book1,” available now from our online Store.
VIEW book1
Poetry Leaflets - A Triptych of Andrews by Andrew Brenza
Three visual poems by Andrew Brenza layering the author’s own name over and over itself to form kaleidoscopic waves of constructive and destructive interference, something like the textual equivalent of saying an ordinary word until it starts to sound bizarre. The Blasted Tree has produced a limited edition of fifty 3.75” x 3.5” leaflet sets containing all three poems on separate sheets. Each set comes tucked in a black paper sleeve with a descriptive card, available now from our online Store, and “A Triptych of Andrews” can be browsed using the link below.
VIEW A Triptych of Andrews
Poetry Chapbook - Keyboards: 14 poems for Tom Jenks by Catherine Vidler
A series of visual/textual poetry by prolific Australian poet Catherine Vidler. Keyboards: 14 poems for Tom Jenks is composed of glitching textual artifacts, an array of digital ephemera unraveling across the page like code through a corrupted processor. As the series go on, each poem invading and overwriting the last, it devolves into rich fields of pixelated letter forms. Keyboards has been produced in a limited edition of 50 chapbooks, hand-bound in blank prototyping circuit boards and aluminum tape, then sealed in translucent anti-static bags (normally used to ship computer hardware). 50 copies of the chapbook are now available from The Blasted Tree’s online Store, and the full sequence of poems can be viewed in the image gallery by following the link below.
VIEW KEYBOARDS
Additionally, Vidler has prepared an audio accompaniment to the series entitled Song-Sonnet for Two Keyboards, which can be downloaded from The Blasted Tree’s Bandcamp.
Poetry Chapbook - a peal of thunder, a moment of by katie o'brien
a peal of thunder, a moment of is concrete poetry based on Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” katie o’brien’s project has involved chopping up Beethoven’s musical score and layering the staves so it’s difficult to make out the original phrase - blurring the material to reflect the disoriented memories they have around losing their grandmother ten years ago. The Blasted Tree has produced a limited edition of 50 hand-bound chapbooks of a peal of thunder, a moment of, available now from our online Store, and the full sequence of poems can be viewed online by following the link below.
VIEW A PEAL OF THUNDER, A MOMENT OF
Poetry Chapbook - The Vispo Bible: John by Amanda Earl
Each piece in Amanda Earl’s newest entry in her ongoing visual poetry project, The Vispo Bible, represents one chapter from the Books of John, New Testament. Text is taken from BibleGateway.com, King James Version, and adapted into beatific, kaleidoscopic images. The Vispo Bible is a life’s work to translate every chapter, every book of the Bible into visual poetry. The Blasted Tree has published seven images into a chapbook bound with black, faux-leather paper and gold embroidery floss, and stamped with archival gold ink. An edition of 40 chapbooks has been produced, and can be purchased from our online Store.
VIEW THE VISPO BIBLE: JOHN
Poetry Broadsides - O/Ô by Aaron Tucker
Visual poetry by Aaron Tucker, O/Ô uses the Google translate camera function to translate the French and English Hansard proceedings for the day that O Canada/Ô Canada was officially adopted as the Canadian national anthem. As concrete poetry, as photographs, as computer layering, language layering, these pieces reflect the quest to form a national identity through the languages spoken and not spoken or translated. O/Ô has been produced in a limited edition of 40 sets of two 11” x 17” broadsides, and each individual broadside features a pair of images translated from the Hansard in either of our two official languages.
View O/Ô
Black Square #1 by derek beaulieu
Constructed from layered up Letraset transfers, Black Square #1 is typographic topography, an exploration of texture and shade, and the geometry of precision and error. The Blasted Tree has produced three limited editions of this visual poem by derek beaulieu at various sizes, each highlighting particular aspects of the work - 50 leaflets printed at scale show how the square looks to the unassisted eye, 10 numbered and signed artist prints magnify and reveal surprising details, and 100 mini-leaflets reduce the image to its superficial geometry. Black Square #1 can be viewed at a high resolution using the link below, and each of the three printed formats are available from our online Store.
View Black Square #1
Poetry Poster - CXXVIII by Sonnet L'Abbé
Produced as part of the Dream Islands group exhibition featured by the Nanaimo Art Gallery (July 21 - September 17, 2017), "CXXVIII" responds to the work of late Salt-Spring Island-based potter Lari Robson in Sonnet L'Abbé's signature style. In this "ecolonization," Shakespeare's 128th sonnet (represented below in orange text) is invaded and fleshed out by the poet, an "erasure-by-crowding" that becomes a formal analogy for colonization. An edition of 700 18" x 24" poster were made for the NAG exhibition, where copies will be made available for free, however if you don't happen to visit Nanaimo this summer, posters can be purchased from The Blasted Tree Store for merely the price of shipping!