Worst Week Ever - ISSUE FIVE

This collaboration started over breakfast, apparently the most important meal of the day. “Angela and her girls came over for brunch one morning. We chatted over pancakes and coffee about her book and my photography and how we could merge the two for a joint opening,” Somers tells us. Somewhere I am a Bird is the central poem, and one that struck a special chord with Somers, as the two were discussing the event. “The bird is coping. The book, for Angela, has been a source of healing, a way of coping.” Through her own work, Somers relates. “In many ways, photography helps me process the world around me. It helps me cope. I wanted to explore how others deal with life.”

This event is obviously extremely personal to both Carter and Somers. That’s to be expected, I suppose, for an artist sharing their work with the world. But this is something more. Writing confessional poetry, exploring the world and it’s inhabitants through the eye of a lens, it’s how these women make sense of things, it’s how they get through everything. It’s how they cope. “Most of us are writers because we need to be, not because we chose to be,” Carter tells me.

At the release of Memory Chose A Woman’s Body, while soaking in the visual stories of Brandy Somer’s captured grief, experiencing the moving and unconventionally honest poetry of Angela Carter climb into your head and plant strong roots in your soul, take a moment to consider your own struggles, your own travels, your own stories. These moments are meant to be shared and understood with your fellow human being.