Titles / Ceremonies for No Repair by Paula Cisewski
Paula Cisewski is a poet, artist, educator, writer, editor, and curator. Her poetry collection, The Becoming Game, is forth-coming from Hanging Loose Press in spring of 2025. She is also the author of Quitter (Diode Editions Book Prize winner), The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prizewinner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister. She lives in Minneapolis
“Night skull elegy, matrilineal pandemic pillow book, harrowing florilegium, red-threaded unbinding spell, Paula Cisewski’s Ceremonies for No Repair descends into the mouth of the lion called care. Down its milky throat and once-thought. Into its green heart of radiant grief. Teeth of the lion a crown of sonnets on a queen of sorrow and strength, these are ceremonies to remember unraveling in the time of Mother Corona, to abracadabra the difficult act of keeping oneself alive letter-by-letter by bearing witness to the cords that once bound, now dissolved.”
—Elisabeth Workman
"The inclusion of art and of the footnotes, and of the diary-like material alongside poems creates this vision of Cisewski's artistic process and radiates outward to echo the artistic processes of others: like THIS IS WHAT ART IS: these are the materials. This is how we transform the shit into flowers. It's really powerful as it accumulates across the book.”
—Danika Stegeman