Books

Removal Line is a book collaboration between poet and nonfiction writer, Laura Mattingly, and painter, Jamie Chiarella. It is forthcoming from Unlikely Books in early 2023.

What does it take to carry both art and motherhood in New Orleans? What colors are made from surviving without a map? I met Jamie Chiarella in bars and at poetry readings nearly 15 years ago while the city was still meager and in recovery from Katrina, but the arts and writing community remained passionately active. She danced in clubs to support her painting. I bartended to finance time writing poems and journalism. In the years of our friendship we’ve admired each other’s craft, helped each other make important decisions, became mothers, became single mothers, watched each other survive, lost parts of ourselves, battled mental and physical illness, learned to heal ourselves, and witnessed the mutual maturation and deepening of each other’s creative abilities. We have taken our children to poetry readings, to cleaning jobs, to sell art on Jackson Square, and they have also come to the memorials of poets and artists we were close to in this community who have passed too early. The type of beauty we have lived and made was steeped in the songs and cityscapes of New Orleans. While the realities of ongoing financial strain and the challenge of raising children without a safety net of family support have created scars in each of us that remain fresh, the fact remains that our art has sustained our spirits. The poems and paintings we present in Removal Line act as tonal mirrors to each other, in the way that our lives have been caught in each other’s reflection. Rather than tell a clear and specific story, they capture a feeling, a mood. This collaboration presents a series of poems and paintings exploring themes of solitude and connection, disenfranchisement, loss and renewal, illness and resuscitation.

The phrase “removal line,” refers specifically to a mastectomy scar I incurred during cancer treatment in 2019, but the title also refers to the experience of families fissuring under the influence of stress, genocide, and diaspora, to the geographical lines of highways, the political lines of borders, and to the images that these lines create. With lines of poetry, strokes of paint, the lines of charcoal that become a figure on the page, an absence can tell a tale. An absence can lead us somewhere we never expected to go, propelling us through mystery and uncertainty to an authentic and unheard of vantage point. Removal Line is a record of what we see from here.

The Book of Incorporation, published by Language Foundry (2012), is a poetic, feminist reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, exploring themes of death and reincarnation from the perspective of a pregnant mother. The narrator cultivates awareness of hosting a returning soul against the backdrop of post Katrina New Orleans, a haunted, flood-torn cityscape. The intention of cultivating a psychological “readiness” for motherhood is starkly juxtaposed with the fear and understanding of how likely everything will fall apart.