About  Meredith Stricker

Meredith Stricker “moves to transpose the search for a new poetic language to the living sphere.”

– Cecelia Vicuña

"The past is reworked as ancestral languages and new languages meet. For Stricker, the linguistic search becomes an effort to regain all of our losses, ''the bee hum of all languages.'“ 

 – The Village Voice

“Meredith Stricker is an architect and cartographer of the new spirit, one that knows to be a poet is to be plural ... she reboots our minds, opening them to atoms, seeds, oceans, buffalo, starfish, and nebulae. She is a protectress of earth and often communicates in the mysterious way of owls, bees, and whales."

– Mark Irwin, poet, professor, USC

MEREDITH STRICKER is an artist, poet and designer working in cross-genre media.

She is the author of six poetry collections and recipient of the National Poetry Series Award.

She co-directs visual poetry studio focusing on architecture and projects to bring together artists, writers, musicians and experimental forms. With architect Thom Cowen, she designs residences, furniture, interiors and site-specific projects, primarily in Big Sur.

Her most recent book, Rewild, was awarded the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press. Other books include: Our Animal, winner of the Omnidawn Open Book Competition; Alphabet Theater, mixed-media performance poetry from Wesleyan University Press; Tenderness Shore, winner of the National Poetry Series Award; mistake, from Caketrain Press; and anemochore, winner of the Gloria Anzaldua Prize from Newfound Press and finalist for the Poetry Society of America Four Quartets Award. Her poetry and art have appeared widely in performance and gallery spaces, and in numerous publications including Conjunctions, Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Best American Experimental Writing.

STATEMENT:

I use mixed media, video, found objects, twigs, recycled materials, paint, words, ink and watercolor to explore living densities of water, trees, seeds, spores carried by the wind, transmittals of bees, animistic traces.

My hope is that art and poetry reclaim their communal role, in ways that give full voice and place to the displaced, undocumented and endangered.

My work is inspired by many years working in an architecture studio with projects in Big Sur, impacted by successive wildfires grown more severe and widespread through climate change. To feel the force of wildfire is profoundly stressful, humbling, revelatory.

Envisioning poetics and art as habitat restoration, I work with materials that address damage and the possibilities of rewilding. This connection between what we love and what threatens it impels us to take action. I'm holding out for a very practical, resourceful, mysterious poetics.      

Poems and art are not decoration, they are not static. They are here to change our lives. 

BACKGROUND:

She received a B.A. in Studio Art in from Sonoma State University where she was awarded a two-year Trione Family Fellowship and an M.F.A. from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, followed by a year-long postgraduate interdisciplinary fellowship. Her areas of study include performance, sculpture, printmaking, paper and book arts, painting, modernist and interdisciplinary poetics.

ABOUT MEREDITH STRICKER'S WORK        

"While the poems traffic in lyric beauty, it¹s never at the cost of pretending the real world with its real ruin doesn¹t exist: oil spills and waste water infused with prescription drug residues...I have great confidence in these poems, in their inclusivity and their formal reach."

– Mary Jo Bang, judge's citation for the Iowa Review Poetry prize on "Hazardous Materials"

"Meredith Stricker's poem, "Milk," invites us, as Dickinson's poems do, to fall into the wonder found deep within the interior of our everyday surrounding ...toward the 'underside / of tenderness,' into the swell of mercy. I cannot think of a more crucial state in which we should be called to dwell in our current moment."

– Deborah Paredez on Meredith Stricker, 2021 Poetry Society of America Dickenson Award

"Rewild is one of the most exciting and original collections I’ve read in years. The poems reject compartmentalization and instead push us toward connection and synthesis. With the perfect balance of dark humor and vulnerability, this poet grapples with climate change, capitalism, the horrors of human history. I’’m grateful for the wide, generous lens of this book, and this poet, right now. I see—perceive—differently having spent time inside these poems."

– Maggie Smith on Rewild, Judge’s Citation for Tupelo Dorset Prize

"To unflinchingly explore what we have done to the world through violence, commodification, and greed while also illuminating what might yet be possible, even in places of profound devastation... Stricker’s careful attention draws us to look deeply, forcing us to see both our complicity in horrors and the beauty in even irrigation ditches, ultimately illuminating the possibility of renewal, of 'burning with animals and greenness.'"

– Ruth Dickey on Rewild

"Meredith Stricker’s Anemochore is an extraordinary, literal plummet down the page, a disorienting space as generous to falling with a poem as it is to let it buoy up the holiness of surrendering to the space for ourselves in the poem."

– CAConrad on Anemochore, Gloria Anzaldua prize, short-listed for the Four Quartets Award, Poetry Society of America

"Our Animal haunts the tragic peripheries of World War II, and in doing so touches upon: G-d, diaspora, trauma, memory, testimony, history, and survival ...

 The brilliance of this book lies in Stricker’s effortless fusion of so many genres— biography, lyric, essay, visual poetry—into a singular idiom while documenting her search for the Soul’s residence after unthinkable disaster. Her ethics is such that the beauty of the writing does not shield us from brutality, instead leading us always 'further into the dark conveyance beyond imagination.'"

– Brian Teare on Our Animal

“Meredith Stricker has taken bits of Kafka's writing, disembodied those bits, and wedded them (welded them) to her own pressing lyric meditations. The result is an intricate collage that feels like a machine fabric that's been taken apart, thread by thread, and then rewoven by hand... Who speaks to us, and who speaks when we speak? The answer ...is that we are who we are and who we read: one composite animal that is inevitably other."

– Mary Jo Bang, from "Our Kafka(esque) Animal", judge's essay for Our Animal

"In Our Animal we find ourselves driving at nightfall, radio on, away from Dante’s selva oscura, in the direction of Eden. The poems are the broadcast of every instance and new species passed along the way. Fabulously, among these species, Stricker numbers you and I."

– Donald Revell on Our Animal

"Meredith Stricker’s chapter-poem is a brilliant mix of lyric, narrative, and epic elements.  Sampling, scrambling, overlaying, collaging, and crossing out language from Kafka’s diaries, stories, and aphorisms and Dante’s hell and paradise, Stricker creates a set of meditations in which human, animal, vegetable, and mineral life not only co-exist but converse... rich in its resonance for our nonhuman moment."

– Adalaide Morris on Our Animal

"mistake is a brilliant book about reading, particularly about reading events that could be construed as accident or chance. Evolution, environmental disaster: are they error or fate or choice.

We find ourselves at the threshold of the illegible, the beginning of revelation...If these pages have, like Orpheus, been torn apart by grief’s passion, then they, too, like Orpheus, come to us mortally wounded and still singing"

– Brian Teare on mistake

"In mistake, Stricker embraces a variety of shapes through which to defy certainty. The conditions of "infinite plasticity" in the artist's work demonstrates the teeming, dynamic, and interconnected relationships between body, mind, text, and land ... Stricker reminds us that with all the constraints of the embodied and mortal being, the spirit stretches out with possibility."

– Deborah Poe, Jacket 2, on mistake

"mistake sings and stutters a loss in form (or species). Through slips, alignments and contractions, unbound residues return from away—the non-place where we had thoughtlessly cast and abandoned them...In this gorgeous and wide-reaching ensemble, Stricker confronts the uncanny, embracing word flux in order to parse proper nouns. What’s left? A pithy sense-trace of dreams condensed within soul books; leaves rustling, watching, falling from trees. The sound of bees swarming.”

– Maria McVarish on mistake

"In Stricker’s Alphabet Theater, language acts, interacts and activates. Giving body to hives and highways, weather and war, her poems perform the co-arising of word and world and ask how to begin our liberation from force."

– Adalaide Morris on Alphabet Theater

"Alphabet Theatre projects an overarching coherence reminiscent of William Carlos Williams Patterson or the late books of HD. Stricker shares with those authors  an intense ecstatic approach to the sonic body of language...Her syncretic deeply ethical vision takes in etymology and entomology, ritual practices and practical politics...

Given the scope of her concerns and the trans-generic inventiveness of her compositions one may expect the book to engage readers interested not only in poetry, but also feminist poetics, performance art, media studies and perhaps even linguistics ...

I feel strongly that Stricker's is a singular and significant voice with an important contribution to make to American poetry."

– Reader's report on Alphabet Theater for Wesleyan University Press

"Elegant, original and provocative  ..."

– Fred Chappell, on Tenderness Shore for the National Poetry Series Awards

"I like her passion, her sense of form, her attention to the page, her connection with the graphic arts."

– Gerald Stern, on Tenderness Shore

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