Likeness

Is this what we look like to others-pieced together from precious, found parts? Blazing with tender color and light? Dancing and keening and contemplating? Oh, all the ways, unseen and unknown, we hold ourselves, project our desires, protect our interiors-captured in the pages of this glorious and magical collection. Hieroglyphic (but entirely legible), alchemical (but in no way esoteric) the drawing/word conversations in LIKENESS are made of the stuff of anyone's day: here is a hammer, a rabbit, a birdcage...and here we all are, bodied in grief, in yearning, in joy, our dreams bearing forth older, deeper forms of knowing. "For whom among us has not felt herself a cipher," Katrina Roberts writes. With these words as your guide, enter this most fabulous and fabular world. -Lia Purpura



I want to use these wonderful meta-fables and homemade fairy tales as poetry prompts. My poem after Katrina Roberts' [you claim never to have peered into a mirror to see a cannibal?], for example, might involve a soup can or mention the pen & ink quirks of Andy Warhol. LIKENESS is a veritable inspiration engine. Even the table of contents reads like a brilliant cento of poetry. In fact, I doubt Roberts distinguishes writing and drawing: every sumptuous line is a poem. -Terrance Hayes



What curious wilderness might come from allowing the visual to occupy more fully the space of text-lest we've forgotten, too, that text is visual? In LIKENESS, Roberts is both auger & answer. At once a prophecy of potential for the flexibility of language & fresh confirmation of the fact of our own imaginations, these poems are unconfined & still razor-sharp in their generosity. I have waited for a collection like this. LIKENESS is a thrilling & necessary addition to our understanding of multiplicity & its joy. -Meg Day



If, as Max Ernst said, the art of collage creates "a spark of poetry," Katrina Roberts's LIKENESS is an utter explosion of poetry. LIKENESS is a book of bodies, machines, explosions, and equations. In these pages, Roberts urgently attempts to solve the mystery of the mortal body through immortal bodies: sketches of sculptures, drawings of paintings, and speech bubbles filled with signs, signifiers, and scribbles. The bodies in LIKENESS, drawn with straightforward, inviting lines and painted with loose and lively color, have heads of animals, kitchen utensils, weapons, and rainbows. The imagery calls to mind the haunted energy of Bianca Stone or Louise Bourgeois, but the singular vision is all Roberts. -Kelcey Parker Ervick



LIKENESS reminds me of Donald Winnicott saying of Francis Bacon, "in looking at faces he seems to need to be painfully striving towards being seen, which is at the basis of creative looking." Roberts's "faces" and portraits are disfigured with the ordinary objects of our everyday piecing together lyrical vignettes of Life. What I love best about these delightful creatures is that they show us the humor and tragedy of our own heads: songs of the psyche, in bright and colorful poised solace, carrying and embracing one another. This is a gorgeous and enchanting book. -Bianca Stone