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Poetry: “Nearer:Breath Of My Breath:Take Not They Tingling” by E. E. Cummings

nearer:breath of my breath:take not they tingling
limbs from me:make my pain their crazy meal
letting they tigers of smooth sweetness steal
slowly in dumb blossoms of new mingling:
deeper:blood of my blood:with upwardcringing
swiftness plunge these leopards of white ream
this pith of darkness:carve an evilfringing
flower of madness on gritted lips
and on sprawled eyes squirming with light insane
chisel the killing flame that dizzily grips.

Querying greys between mouthed houses curl

thirstily. Dead stars stink. dawn. Inane,

the poetic carcass of a girl

— ee cummings

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Poetry: “The Rabbit Catcher” by Sylvia Plath

It was a place of force –
The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,
Tearing off my voice, and the sea
Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead
Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

I tasted the malignity of the gorse,
Its black spikes,
The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers.
They had an efficiency, a great beauty,
And were extravagant, like torture.

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Poor Little Dears: The Sinister and Mysterious Childhood Depictions of Hikari Shimoda

Hikari Shimoda’s creepy paintings of children are simultaneously sweet and uncanny. The eerie mouths, asymmetrical, strange little faces and one-eyed appearance (often one milky eye, one bruised and bloody-looking) of these alien but painfully familiar little beings, rendered in bright or pastel, almost child-friendly, but also quite subtly mixed and delicate, colors, all serve to give an unsettling sense of the corruption of innocence, an inversion of the saccharine bliss associated with little children.

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Flowers of Sickness: Marcel van der Vlugt’s “A New Day”

These lovely images are from Marcel van der Vlugt’s medically inspired series A New Day. They depict “flowers of illness,” featuring the subjects in hospital regalia (bandages, oxygen masks, bound limbs), among medical equipment, upon the operating and examining table, but simultaneously intertwined with, wearing, sprouting flowers, seeming somehow strong at the same time that they represent fragility and trauma, and suggesting that they are reborn, given new life in the midst of sickness and sterility.

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Flora and Fauna: The Craft of Lorenzo Nanni

Lorenzo Nanni makes incredibly intricate, beautiful (often wearable) art, taking inspiration in an amazing way from organic forms and anatomical structures, reflecting a kind of gorgeous hybridization between animal and plant life, often replete with creaturesque tendrils seeming to infest as well as adorn the host. He creates his own breathtaking “lifeforms” from craft materials. I particularly love his Arteries, Veins series, the way that they depict details from anatomy as a textbook would, but in the startlingly tangible materials of his craft: felt, beads, embroidery. They look so visceral, so intricate, but remind us at the same time of their artificial construction, the biological juxtaposed with the inorganic.

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