How Clear the Cut
Anney Bolgiano
Feature Date
- August 23, 2022
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“How Clear the Cut” from FLAT-PACK: by Anney Bolgiano.
Published by New Michigan Press on February 22, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Anney Bolgiano.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Anney Bolgiano lives in Washington, DC where she writes/creates visual poems, essays, and short stories and teaches writing at Howard University and George Washington University. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and a BA from Guilford College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, DIAGRAM, Nashville Review, Salamander, The Rupture, Thin Air, A Velvet Giant, HAD, The Figure One, Frances House, and elsewhere. Anney is a Pushcart Prize Nominee and past resident of Art Farm Nebraska.
Zadie Smith said "Early on in the crisis, I picked up Marcus Aurelius and for the first time in my life read his Meditations not as an academic exercise, nor in the pursuit of pleasure, but with the same attitude I bring to the instructions for a flat-pack table-I was in need of practical assistance." Anney Bolgiano's Flat-Pack takes this exercise to its logical conclusion, collaging actual IKEA Flat-Pack instructions with text from Meditations, creating something completely new.
"Flat-Pack is a wonderfully original collage of text and image. Disembodied hands grapple with hammers; human figures fumble with puzzling tasks, tools, and questions: 'Are you awaiting the present moment? seeking a well-ordered life?' With its mash-up of modern anxiety and stoic wisdom, Flat-Pack manages to be harrowing, comforting, and comic all at once."
—Sarah J. Sloat
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