Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings & Touching in the Wake of the Virus

A visual poetry book that grapples with the idea of the end of the Covid-19 quarantine.

“Of all that can never be returned, / the opening represents a kind of iterability,” reads the epigraph to poet Karasick and graphic designer Lehrer’s stylized poetry collection. It’s accompanied by a quote by the late Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who’s frequently lauded for his deconstruction strategy of analyzing a topic, such as art or politics, through a distortion or subversion of established narratives. In many ways, the Covid-19 pandemic has thrust deconstruction upon the world, unraveling beliefs and allowing people to see the world with new eyes—whether they wish to or not. Karasick’s poems and Lehrer’s images of textual choreography deal with what emerging from a long, isolating quarantine feels like “in the today of wild touching; / the today of withholding, the today of / passionate rations.” This book has two halves; the former features seven numbered “Openings,” and the latter the longer “Touching in the Wake of The Virus.” The first feels largely cerebral (“just / open my head…this open house / of whispered screams”) while the second feels much more tactile, grounded in the yearnings of a distressed body: “how to touch without touching…where touching is already too much.” Karasick often uses alliteration and sonic association, using language to represent this slow re-entry—the kinetic chaos of relearning one another. Lehrer makes a performance out of form, drawing parentheses and blocky black corners around lines that talk of “borders” and “evasions”; blackening the many o’s of “openings” and their associates into portals; forcing the eye to sweep across unpredictable, textured pages when Karasick’s speakers lament their physical alienation. The words curl, grow, shrink, and wrap around loops and illustrations that still can’t fill the pages’ stark white space, evoking a feeling of impatience. At a few points, the repetitive form is less compelling, but overall, this collaboration keenly embodies a collective trauma that eludes a singular definition.

An arresting attempt to put collective pain and healing on the page.