Willow Books, a small press and imprint of Aquarius Press, has published a new chapbook of poems by Krista Franklin, second year MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts, and Cave Canem Fellow.

“Study of Love & Black Body is a small collection of poems that deals with ideas of motherhood, the body, cultural and internal conflict and identity.” says Franklin, “…from a variety of angles.” The collection is the result of work has been in process for several years, taking many forms and arrangements over almost a decade. Some of the poems in the collection were previously published individually in anthologies and literary journals, but they had yet to come together as a whole. Franklin’s creative process over the course of the project involved “reorganizing, revising, refocusing, and re-imagining format, as well as removing some poems and adding new ones. The collection finally evolved into the book form in 2011, and I feel it has found its proper voice and format.”

Franklin is a respected presence in the Chicago Poetry community, and her poetry and mixed-media collages have been published in lifestyle and literary journals such as Copper Nickel, RATTLE, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam, and Callaloo, and in the anthologies Encyclopedia Vol. II, F-K and Gathering Ground. She maintains a rigorous interdisciplinary approach in her work, incorporating sound, performance, and visual narratives along with poetry and spoken word. She is a co-founder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars. Over the past six years several poets have honored her visual experiments by commissioning her to create original cover artwork for their published books. “I’m always creating an ongoing dialogue between poetry and my visual work, and I see the incorporation of book and paper arts as a logical next step in furthering this exploration.”

Study of Love & Black Body: Poems by Krista Franklin is available for pre-publication order here.