I would like to thanks Alien Buddha Press for publishing my amazing (ahem) and oh so experimental debut pamphlet – Shapes of Motherhood.
You can buy from my American publisher’s site or their Amazon shop – please use this link to buy this wild – vispo, experimental, a long lyrical….Shapes of Motherhood
Here’s a preview of this masterpiece – ’tis bleeding glorious “SPOTLIGHT: Shapes of Motherhood (Motherhood of Shapes) by Michelle Moloney King – Alien Buddha Press”
Words of praise for Shapes of Motherhood
"Silence is in sound, clarity is in mud and shapes are the means of poetry. Paradox is profitable, it is all our mothers. Bear this in mind, and encounter a book like this, with such extraordinary range, agility, energy and invention. A book pervaded by the palpable sense that only the author, Michelle Moloney King, could've written it, fusing brutish asemic writing with slick concrete poems, pushing the digital against the hand-made, the sculptural against the literary. This is a book of wonders, and it announces a remarkable poet."
- SJ Fowler
SJ Fowler is a writer, poet and artist who lives in London. As well as publishing multiple volumes of literary poetry, his work has celebrated the fields of performance literature, literary curation, collaborative poetry and neuropoetics. His asemic writing, sound poetry and concrete poetry have also become known internationally. He is the founder of Poem Brut and the European Poetry Festival www.stevenjfowler.com
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Shapes of Motherhood is a combination of asemic writing, some of which slips into the realm of landscape and a selection of word poems deeply rooted in Irish culture.
The colorful asemic writing works speak to the joyful energy of observed childhood from the eyes of a mother's heart and the inevitable sense of loss all parents fear in the passage of the overflowing moments as they are lost into memory and as memory passes into oblivion leaving only bits and pieces of images and emotions. How do we hold the ocean of life in a teacup? The counterpoint to these artworks are a set of word poems that seem to be a collection of cryptic private notes reflecting on unknown events or collections of events like so many mementos laid out on a table that we can only gaze upon and loan our conjectures as to their relationships to one another and to ourselves.
- Cecil Touchon
Cecil Touchon is a collagist, painter, poet, publisher, curator, director of the Ontological Museum, editor of Asemics Magazine and Repository Magazine. www.linktr.ee/Touchon
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‘Shapes of Motherhood’ by Michelle Moloney King takes the reader on an experimental journey of wild poetics and kaleidoscopic asemic writing centering on themes of motherhood, the family, and its internal and external challenges. Within the poetry the reader finds themselves entangled within vivid
wordplay that conjures both taste and sound, rolling them within wave after wave of a mothers insight and emotion. This is often skillfully contrasted against the local environment to give a powerful sense of both politics and place. Highly experimental in language, the poetry is interspersed with bright asemic and visual pieces, as well as a stark monochrome, that allows the author to build on the works central themes whilst also giving room for the reader to seek meaning and interpretation that transcends the prescriptive. In doing so Michelle Moloney King has created something that knits together both the written and the visual to leave a real sense of wonderment. ‘Shapes of Motherhood’
is a holistic and deeply giving body of work that can, and should be, revisited many many times. -
- Stuart McPherson
Stuart McPherson is the author of ‘Pale Mnemonic’ (LEGITIMATE SNACK / BROKEN SLEEP BOOKS) and ‘Water Bearer’ (BROKEN SLEEP BOOKS) www.theeabsentee.com
Michelle Moloney King 