The Toe The Horse The Sister, Maria Zahle

A new book of visual poetry by artist Maria Zahle. This collection of 25 poems are a response to life as an artist, mother, sister, daughter and lover.

The poems oscillate between lived experience and formal experimentation, described through memories and intimate speculations. The poetry shape-shifts between words and visual marks: insistent groupings of punctuation, drawn shapes and repeating patterns. Each page is a tactile space, with language and image vibrating in tension with each other. This sculptural poetry encourages an active reader.

Many of the poems reflect on small but vivid events retold and refracted through language. The book is not a linear narrative, but rather an exploration of the ways in which experience and memory collide, fragment and overlap within our consciousness. Throughout our lives, we all exist as a range of selves, taking on various roles – child, adult, artist, friend, stranger. In Zahle’s poems, these selves are present all at once. There is no boundary between a memory, a touch, a word, a thought.

Maria Zahle is an artist based in Copenhagen and London. Her debut book of poetry 8 Poems, was published in 2017 with Akerman Daly. Her solo exhibition No Stranger or Lover to Me will open at Kunsthal Rønnebæksholm, Næstved, Denmark in March 2022. She is represented by Arcade London/Bruxelles.

28pp | edition of 250
Published by Akerman Daly, 2021

165 x 298 mm, Singer sewn

9780993018190