Companion book – The Heavy Lifting Companion

The digitally-printed companion book to HEAVY LIFTING holds the full suite of poems produced by Theresa during this multi-year collaboration. Theresa’s poems and Felicia’s bookwork are framed in a preface by Inge Bruggeman that provides the context of the project within the artists’ book world, a foreword by Felicia that describes how and why the book came into being, and essays about elements of the greater Heavy Lifting Project.

Theresa Whitehill’s poems tread a tenuous path at the boundaries between personal and collective reckonings with work that portrays alternating grief, tenderness, defiance, and outrage. The result is a suite of poems that deliberately fuses moments of personal and collective experience in a profound act of witnessing. The work acknowledges the almost unbearable pace of relentless crises that have unfolded in recent years—covid, climate change, racial injustice, the threat of totalitarianism, immigration crises—and also begin to dwell in what might lie beyond these times. 

From the foreword by Inge Bruggeman: In her poems, Theresa Whitehill subverts the forms of the lament and the ballad and the assumed lyricism that goes along with those forms, nearly lulling the reader into a seeming complacency, before tripping the reader up at a key moment to declare: “War then: the background always. Dreamers/and heretics—always.”

Richly illustrated with photography of the limited-edition artists’ book and the creative process that went into its making, the book was designed by the poet and artist, both designers, who found the heavy lifting of this project much much lighter when shared.

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From the sensitive and insightful review in North of Oxford by poet, Greg Bem:

It’s painful to think that such important work is coming into the world at this moment when it is so hard for the work to be seen as it should be seen, but there is also the new way in which such work will be seen because of the upended paradigms and the emerging changes. It’s a moment of free-fall. —Theresa Whitehill

A sense of frailty and risk. A sense of alluring. A sense of invitation: invitation to experience challenge and challenge met with response. Reading The Heavy Lifting Companion offers the experience of responsibility. To support that which suffers. To prevent that which is on the brink. To douse that which burns. Rice and Whitehill provide a call to know this, to walk with it, to understand it. Their explorations are beautiful despite the harrowing conditions.

Read more about the artists’ book, HEAVY LIFTING, here.

Edition of 320, of which 150 are available for sale  $35