Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist.

She is the author of the poetry collections Someone

Elses Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014), Poetry Comics from the Book of
Hours (Pleiades Books, 2016), and multiple chapbooks. She is also a contributing artist for a
special edition of Anne Carson's Antigonick. Stone co-edits Monk Books, and is executive
director of The Ruth Stone Foundation, an organization dedicated to the furthering of poetry
and the arts and the preservation of Ruth Stone's legacy and house in Vermont.
Of Ruth Stone, Bianca Stone once wrote that Her relationship to the world existed with one
arm and foot beyond the veil. Perhaps in a similar manner, Bianca Stones poetry comics
are grounded in everyday life, they draw on our current times anxieties and plights, but
stretch past the veil of realism to reach out to the dead who want to be remembered
correctly. In Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours, the mythic gods and the voices of
history concur and coalesce with the simulacra of secular life in the globalized world.
Stones characters struggle between infinite desire for communion and the reality of isolation
and decay. They wear masks, or are bird-headed, or their heads resemble wooden New
England houses, but this carnivalesque display is not a means of concealing human faces. It
is, on the contrary, the disclosure of inmost tensions occurring in the psyche of a generation
that can only waltz in the electrified ballrooms of cyberspace and that seeks comfort in the
arms of friends on late-night taxis.
Image and writing, the mythic icon and the rational logos constitute the other axis of this
poetic enterprise. If a regular comic construes a tension between the fixity of images and the
flow of narration, image and text find in Stones poetry comics a different balance. Dialogue
balloons appear but do not convey dialogues, properly speaking. Characters emit utterances
that no one hears. Even if standing next to each other, or horseback-riding one another, the
answer to their utterances is a silence that makes the urge for communion all the more
evident. In other passages, text will appear in boxes or in the guise of backdrop graffiti that
frames and re-signifies the image by depicting the characters disjointed thoughts. Stones
verses tear open a cleft in the image, a void which baffles the reader and which might be the
central thesis of her work.
This is an aesthetics that traces the connections between secular hedonism, depression, and
the presence of the gods, the enchantedness of a world that deems us mentally ill, unfit for
existence. It turns out, as Stone herself seems to prove throughout her work, that we can still
find warmth and hope in the contemplation of the beautiful mutants that surround us, those
creatures that show up to fill us with smoke.
So, without further ado, I leave you with Bianca Stone.