HEIDI RESZIES
artist + poet
Illusory Borders
The Operating System, 2019
Heidi Reszies’ book, ILLUSORY BORDERS, wanders intriguingly along the edges of what making is: making a world, a garden, a book / making textiles, pictures, poems / making a home, making a way, making a life. In all these permutations of forging, which is to say apprehending, Reszies creates a constellated texture of convergence as the natural world moves through its life cycle, burgeoning and brimming and collapsing, and the interior world moves alongside, filling in the emotional gaps with guesses and glimpses of light. The poems themselves are scattered like seeds over the pages, spacious and spare, annotated with the ideas that exist—invisible but felt—in the in-between. Indeed, the majority of the text falls in what might be called the margins, the periphery, layering a delicate archive of moods throughout the pages, tenderly yielding a place for the smallest, most glimmery shred of hope to bloom like breath against glass that, when finally cleared, gives “a window inside another window inside.”
—Allison Titus
With ILLUSORY BORDERS, Heidi Reszies has created a beautifully crystalline and head-long book—a head space book—a deliberate constellation of open field stars, footnotes, typewritten scraps, sequences and gaps, “a little collapse.” It’s an extended meditation on the ways one might (and here, one does) create a collision between design thinking and the poetic imagination that itself results in a blending of inner and outer, border and interior, and most especially, writer and reader. Thus, two things here (or many) become one. Meanwhile, Reszies revels formally in the book’s bookness, its margins and arrangements, the letter forms and pages both empty and full. Here we see the selecting intelligence, and the natural world’s blueprint for it, as mirror images of each other, not different things at all. These are poems to attend and re-attend, tracking the notes between the wild bright dots.
—Matt Hart
Heidi Reszies’s ILLUSORY BORDERS asks: “Couldn’t we invert everything that’s familiar, just to see what breaks through?” Reszies grounds us in the space of the garden, studio, and home to explore how we mend and move and grow through the seasons in “little arrays of typography & color edited & redrawn to make separation/variation/illustration count.” An extensive meditation on process and creation, Illusory Borders invites us into the margin as an intimate, domestic space. In the tranquil moments of looking out the window, planting bulbs, and mending clothing, we “see the whole thing: new things still happening everywhere/every force to reckon with/every little thing.”
—Jacket 2 (jacket2.org)