Conversation with the Stone Wife

4.6/5 ( ratings)

"These poems engage the 'Venus' of Willendorf, the 30-35,000 year old figurine found in Willendorf, Austria over a century ago. Hundreds of these 'venus' figurines were found all throughout Europe and Asia, and many scientists theorize that nomadic tribes created them during the ice age in a phenomenon called Peak Shift Effect, in which a people creates art to exaggerate what they lack. Here, adequate fat storage and fertility and general human robustness. I’m interested in this, because I have a history of body dysmorphia and history of food issues. I just uncomfortably looked to my thighs and want to apologize but will continue sipping iced americano instead. So many of these poems were written over four years ago—not a long stretch of time relatively speaking—but for my current aesthetics and bureau of ideas, feels eternal. Coincidentally, I’m facing these old poems as artifacts of neuroses."

The "artifact" design concept is inspired by the same figurine as the poems themselves. Like the Woman of Villendorf, each book has been colored by hand, rubbed with natural earth pigments—red ochre and yellow ochre, plus river valley soils dug in Bloof's native NJ. The title plate appliqué is inspired by a museum display, printed in archival ink. The interiors are laser-printed on natural white acid-free, archival-quality paper. Handsewn in natural twine.

Conversation with the Stone Wife is the third chapbook in the 2014 series from Bloof Books. Each chapbook in the series will be released in a limited edition of one hundred numbered copies, followed by a digital release.

Natalie Eilbert’s first book of poems, Swan Feast, is forthcoming from Coconut Books in 2015. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Tin House, West Branch, Handsome, and many others. She lives and writes in Brooklyn where she is the founding editor of the Atlas Review. For more information, visit her site at venusofnatalie.tumblr.com.