The Color She Gave Gravity traces longing for connection between women. An ecopoetics of the bodymind, these poems take us inside a dance inside an imaginary city inside sculpted spaces inside the insomniac body inside sister grief inside she. The work emerges from a landscape of somatic engagement and from experiences of psychiatric systems and multiple hospitalizations.
Cover Photo: “Crossing Visible,” by Gwynneth VanLaven
The Operating System, 2017
Poems from The Color She Gave Gravity
- “Past Midnight,” “Unsolicited,” “Electrical Work” in Typo
- “Penumbra” in Streetnotes
Reviews
“If we understand a disability poetic as one that takes seriously the poem as a body and the body as a three-dimensional space that is inconsistent, surprising, and unwieldy, then we can understand Heit’s collection as a masterpiece of bodies moving against and through one another, making meaning with one another while also each dancing in their own rhythm.”–Ally Day in The Collagist
“That is what poetry can do, make a network of intimate selves, a matrix of listeners: the potential of non-univocal, indeterminate, imprecise exchanges.” —Andrew F Giles in Entropy
“The poems have a distinct sense of movement about them, graceful and measured, rooted in the physical, but always with a sense of how our emotions and states of mind affect our bodies.”–Kelly Lynn Thomas in The Rumpus
“This book carries a sense of surviving, coping, and pushing forward.”
—Cheyenne Heckermann in Anomaly
“Stephanie Heit writes a poetic kinesthesia in which the landscape and the body give way to loss and renewal: language, place, survival, and connection are explored. But the book transcends location and lamentation. The poems are not a geography of experience nor are they a standard bearer of sorrow. They are a sensate form to an unseen force.” —Denise Leto in Wordgathering
Praise
“[I]n the slow gestures/of a person adjusting/to too much light” and with the faith of a chemist, Stephanie Heit sets fire inside her own dark and offers “light someone not yet arrived/will understand.” The Color She Gave Gravity is a breathtaking (which is to say, life-giving) book that both stills and energizes by breaking and reforming the unseen bonds of DNA, language, geography, and history.” – TC Tolbert
“Stephanie Heit’s ‘The Color She Gave Gravity’ is a sonorous force field calling on tenderness, care, vigilance and abandon. An all-encompassing clarity saturates mind, spirit, movement and emotion. To locate the blind spot and unburden experience of the horizon’s relentless pressure—this is what the text does tenfold, imparting and dispelling the inexplicable along peripheries and in intimately centered frames of movement: gorgeously evocative and intensely realized capacious psychic flows.” – Brenda Iijima
“Stephanie Heit has choreographed, in her first full-length poetry collection, a deeply engaging articulation of the interplay between mental illness and the creative instinct, history and destiny, and limitation and willful boundary. Here, we have an author brave enough to say “I suffer” and talented enough to excavate the lyrical beauty of that suffering. The Color She Gave Gravity offers the reader a textured view of a graceful body torn between trying to remember and trying to forget.” – Airea D. Matthews
“In these fierce, moving poems, we witness a self as it seeks its right path through those landscapes we call world. We are taken along, wandering through urban streets or across beaches that once were lakes, sometimes dreamily, sometimes searingly awake, digging through stories and years. These poems enact one of our most potent human gifts: our ability to find ourselves — tumbling, falling down, standing up — in proprioceptive relation to everything in our earthly realm.” – Eleni Sikelianos
Interviews
Check out an excerpt and a conversation with The Operating System’s founder and creative director, Elæ, about almost posthumous publication, queer/mad poetics, and the weave of movement and words.
This Dunes Review interview shares interdisciplinary starts, creating The Color She Gave Gravity in different environments and bodymind states, mad activism, writing in water.