On the page and on the screen, my poetry explores the ways in which violence, grief and spiritual hunger affect the way humans use language. For many years, I theorized my poetry mostly in terms of sound and silence, but the more I started thinking about the relationship between my body and language, the more I wanted to create a multi-sensorial experience. We don’t experience language merely through sound or even visually on the page, but everywhere we go. I walk through the woods and I’m reminded of a story, or I watch a woman cradle a jug of wine and it reminds me words like “insatiable” and “longing.” I think in terms of interwoven networks between words and images, sounds and movement, and so my video poems are an attempt-in-progress to capture both my associative writing process as well as to situate my poetry in the actual, physical world of things.
Patricia Killelea is the author of the poetry collection Other Suns (Swan Scythe press, 2011), and her second poetry collection, titled Counterglow, is forthcoming from Mango Publications (April 2016). Her recent work appears in Quarterly West, The Common, Waxwing, Spiritus, As/Us, and others. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Northern Michigan University, where she teaches courses in Native American literature and Creative Writing. Patricia is the poetry editor for the literary journal Passages North, the reviews editor for As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, and is also an editorial board member of the online journal Mujeres Talk. She holds a Ph.D. in Native American Studies and an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis. Patricia is also a metal musician and works in digital poetics, producing video poems and ambient soundscapes.
