A Domestic Lookbook
JoAnne McFarland’s second multimedia collection with Grid Books is a companion piece to her gorgeous and powerful Pullman (2023). Likewise examining themes of labor and love, McFarland writes in conversation with the text of Malinda Russell’s A Domestic Cook Book, the first known cookbook published by a Black woman in the United States. In poetic call and response, the poems and art pieces in this collection call to account the pervasiveness of gun violence in the U.S., as well as the current rollback of women’s rights and autonomy, urging readers to counteract destructive acts with creative output. As the poet herself puts it, “each act of making thwarts violence’s aim to destroy.”
This collection includes 23 full color reproductions of McFarland’s paintings and collage pieces. The audiobook version, to be released in spring 2024, will be narrated by the author in collaboration with designer and voice artist Schuyler Grant.
About the Poet & Artist
JoAnne McFarland is an artist, poet, and curator. Her poetry collections include Pullman, American Graphic, Acid Rain, Identifying the Body, 13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl, and Tracks of My Tears. JoAnne's artworks are part of the permanent collections of The Library of Congress, The Columbus Museum of Art, The Department of State, and Ikon Corporation among others. Recent exhibitions include: Best & Brightest and The Indivisible Spectrum, both at The Painting Center in New York City. JoAnne is the Artistic Director of Artpoetica Project Space in Brooklyn which exhibits work that focuses on the intersection of language and visual representation.
“ A poet as sensitive to the visual possibilities of poems as she is the sonic and allusive, McFarland’s poems are often bookmatched with their own erasures, as though run through a magnetic imaging device to reveal their hidden, and often startling, currents.
JoAnne McFarland offers the body in thrall, in love, the body etched by ritual, by shame, the Black body, the female body, the body fully human.
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