Wet Cement Press takes great pleasure in announcing the publication of Tender to Empress, a ground breaking collection of visual poems by Maureen Alsop that fuse visual and written elements into a new means of imagining. Like other goddesses of myth, Alsop works at the crossroads, the place where words give shape to image, where images speak back, and our sense of language expands beyond the page. Crafted from the perspective of Écriture Feminine, Alsop's visual poems engage an intuitive process that conjures buried incidents from our collective history of violence and longing into a series of connected vignettes. Within her vivid and complex juxtapositions—warships and birds, horses and women’s faces—our orientations toward who we see, and what we see, is made new again. With a luxurious palette of colors, an innovative and often humorous layering of text and archival image, and a poetic voice that never wavers from its vision, Tender to Empress returns us to the sensual  pleasures of reading & viewing. 
 
"I go seeking, not through experiment, but through somatic integrity, a kind of surge through the body that I may land upon, live within, elaborate. The collages allow the imagination to stay open and simultaneously suture the language into a new arrangement.” —Maureen Alsop
 
Bio
Maureen Alsop, PhD is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Pyre (What Books Press, 2021). Her visual poems have appeared online, in print and on exhibition at various journals and venues including Entropy, Filling Station Magazine, Hyades Magazine, among others.