DVAA Member since 2023
Sara Mae Henke
Website: sara-mae.squarespace.com
About:
Sara Mae (they/them) is a writer and musician who was raised on the Chesapeake Bay. They are a 2023 Big Ears Music Festival Artist Scholar, a 2022 Tinhouse Summer Workshops Attendee, a 2022 Open Mouth Attendee, and a 2021 Sewanee Writer’s Conference Scholar. They were a finalist for the 2023 Loraine Williams Prize and will be published in the Georgia Review. Their work also appears in or is forthcoming from FENCE, Waxwing, The Offing, and elsewhere. Their second chapbook, Phantasmagossip, won the 2023 Vinyl45 chapbook competition with YesYes Books. They write shimmery rock music as The Noisy. They received their MFA in poetry from UT Knoxville.
Artist Statement:
For a few years I have been investigating the technology of the Exquisite Corpse, a collaborative game of the Surrealists, which can function in poetry as a metabolizing agent, or a process of decay, through the defamiliarization of an image, logic folding to associative grief, genre-blurring, descending into polyvocality, documenting the ephemera of queer nightlife and intimacies, and the grotesque as a surreality that articulates our very real feelings and experiences. I think of the Exquisite Corpse, then, as a non-binary visual poetry, building on the work of poets like Danez Smith,and CA Conrad, that allows me to write in response to Surrealist collaborator painter-writers Leonora Carrintgon and Remedios Varo, as well as other revolutionaries like Aimé Césaire and Mary Low. to The Exquisite Corpse process has been responsible for life-affirming, queer imagination in times of despair, grief, and resistance. In writing ekphrastically and bending the visual elements of the poems, in communing with the literary and artistic lineage of those before me, my visual poems can become sites of queer erotic understanding and liberatory imagination.
