(S)WORN STATE(S)

Drawing upon social history, myth, and visionary poetics, (S)worn State(s) remembers, challenges, and reimagines ‘worn’ narratives of women’s experiences in the context of shifting historical and cultural landscapes in Ireland in the Irish Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 and beyond. In an extended poetic conversation, Kimberly Campanello, Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Dimitra Xidous created a suite of individual poems before co-authoring the accompanying long poem Her-Text that reinscribes and ‘swears’ an oath to new and unfolding ‘states’ of being and making.

The poems were created in Dublin, York, Achill Island and at the Boyne Valley, a prehistoric landscape dating from the Neolithic period. Across the poems, the texture of the language emerges from the Donegal Gaeltacht, Greece, Italy and North America. In 2019, the project received the inaugural Markievicz Award for Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, allowing the poets generous space to come together and create this work. What can be made out of the work has been was my mind over the last number of years as drafts of these poems started to appear. The result is three very different books stylistically in their writing, brought together under one roof (solander box). 

From the colophon: Designed and letterpress printed by Jamie Murphy, assisted by Ellen Martin-Friel and Mikah Smillie. The 14d type is Gudrun Zapf-Von Hesse’s Diotima (1951) and Hermann Zapf’s Optima (1958). The paper is 100 gsm Munken Print vol 15 and 90 gsm Zerkall Ingres (RIP). The books are housed together in a solander box accompanied by their collaborative poem Her-Text, printed in the same types on assorted handmade papers (mostly Irish-made 60-90gsm Griffen Mill with a few Italian-made 150gsm Fabriano Roma). 80 copies printed. The stab sewn bindings have been executed by Elize de Beer. Solander boxes by Tom Duffy.