Cross-disciplinary chapbook created in collaboration with photographer Robert Revere. The book addresses the act of looking, and the experience of going to museums. It is also about the COVID pandemic, and a time when museums and cultural spaces were closed.
Reviews, Interviews
Listed in the Washington Blade‘s December 2023 “Favorite Books for Holiday Gifts”: “…a fab present for lovers of photography, museums, and poetry. Revere and Roberts were deeply affected by the closure of museums during the COVID pandemic. In this lovely chapbook, they create a new ‘museum’ of their own.”
Listed as one of 9 recommended books on Bay Area Reporters‘s “National Poetry Month LGBTQ Reading List” for 2024: “Queer poet and historian Kim Roberts joins the collaboration club with her new cross-disciplinary chapbook Corona/Crown (Word Tech Editions, 2023). Roberts’ project is particularly distinguished in that her collaborator is fine art photographer and foreign service officer Robert Revere. Co-created in response to the impact that the pandemic had on them individually regarding the sensation of being cut off from the cultural enrichment of visiting museums and other such venues. The pairing of Roberts’ poems and Revere’s photos creates a kind of gallery of the page.”
Advance Praise
“The writing and images in this many-layered book make me see my world in new ways. They bring together the most personal and the abstract, interacting and making me more and more curious as I turn each page, excited to discover what will come next. What new relationship will unfold between word and image, between self and other, between what is seen and what is perceived? This treasure of a book speaks on many levels about why and how art matters, what beauty is, and where we find it. Each time I reread it, I find something new. This is a book to be savored.”
—Vaughn Sills, photographer of Places for the Spirit, Traditional African American Gardens, and One Family
“‘The lines, the sweet curves. The way light hits the surface of a face’ observes the speaker, referencing her long-standing love affair with the art of sculpture (—all the while playing the instrument of assonant rhyme). But as this gorgeous marriage of text (prose poem) and image (photographs) is revealed, one senses that something else is in play. Yes, these pieces ‘tremble, they vibrate—’ But why? Because although the backdrop of this dual artistic journey is a global pandemic, one can’t (I couldn’t) escape that what is unfolding before our eyes and ears is a portrait of an artist (falling) in love: ‘[T]he way, when you smile, you always lift your chin, as if pleasure starts at the neck and travels upward to the mouth. Upward to your eyes.’ But what also felt true is that these photographic images were very deliberately placed, often offering this viewer an example of the visual experience depicted in the preceding text. As if, in the face of our mortalities, art and the possibility of love is what kept us going: ‘This is how we map our loss. All those beautiful curves.’”
—Francisco Aragón, author of After Rubén and Glow of Our Sweat
Corona/Crown