Bird Ladder Sky Snake - by Rikki Ducornet & Fowzia Karimi (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In the tradition of William Blake's illuminated manuscripts, Bird Ladder Sky Snake is a surreal, collaborative collection of dreams and a testament to artistic friendship.

For years, Rikki Ducornet and Fowzia Karimi have been exchanging dreams: one records her dreams as prose poems or stories, and the other illustrates them. The result is Bird Ladder Sky Snake, a book that resists categorization just as surely as our dreams resist our attempts at analysis or instruction: it is a memoir, an art book, a dream journal, a folk narrative, and can be flipped and read in two directions. Read one way, the dreamer is Karimi, with illustrations by Ducornet; the other, the dreamer is Ducornet, with illustrations by Karimi. "Dreams," Karimi writes, "are the source and substance of myth, prophecy, art, and invention; they have always shaped our lives." Bird Ladder Sky Snake is an invitation to dream alongside two prolific artists, to follow their muse, and to slip between realms of existence.

About the Author

Fowzia Karimi has a background in visual arts and biology. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, California. Her work explores the correspondence on the page between the written and visual arts. She is a recipient of The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and the author of Above Us the Milky Way and small pieces. She lives in Denton, Texas.

Rikki Ducornet is a transdisciplinary artist. Her work is animated by an interest in nature, Eros, tyranny and the transcendent capacities of the creative imagination. She is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and artist, and her fiction has been translated into fifteen languages. Her art has been exhibited internationally, most recently with Amnesty International's traveling exhibit I Welcome, focused on the refugee crisis. She has received numerous fellowships and awards including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard College Arts and Letters Award, the Prix Guerlain, a Critics' Choice Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Her novel The Jade Cabinet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.