Eye: Poems and Retina Prints

by Elizabeth Goldring

Price 100 pages, $15.95 paper

ISBN 1-886157-37-5

When artist and poet Elizabeth Goldring found a way to use technology for visual art, the images she captured on her damaged retinas became "frozen traces of seeing, the memory of words that move and flow into meaning." These exquisite prints are grounded on the image of her optic nerve, "individual as a thumbprint," to embody not only Goldring's remarkable vision but the very process of creation. As a poet, Elizabeth Goldring pushes through silence to speak. As a visual artist who is blind, she uses darkness to frame the world she allows, then compels us to see. Eye is a work of transformative--and great--art. --Hilda Raz, author of Divine Honors and Trans

With her limited vision, Elizabeth Goldring opens a dazzling new world of images for the sighted. Her retina prints are small revelations. Her poems are steeped in light and shadow. This is a beautiful and haunting collection. --Alan Brody, Associate Provost for the Arts, MIT

Elizabeth Goldring's Eye opens out like an impressionist landscape brimming with color and light. At once strange and familiar, Goldring's poems and prints are alive with movement and radically awake to news of the sensuous world. --Constance Merritt, author of A Protocol for Touch

Elizabeth Goldring's books include Laser Treatment and Without Warning. Her poems, photographs and writings have appeared in such publications as Asylum, Spud Songs, Parnas, Leonardo, New England Journal of Optometry, and Syllabus. She has been interviewed about her work on ABC Evening News, the BBC, and New Letters on the Air, among others.

Goldring is the Charlotte Moorman Senior Fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, where she has also served as acting co-director and exhibits and projects director as well as lecturer in architecture. She has presented her poetry, multimedia environments and installations at venues in Europe and North America. With Otto Piene, she co-directs the International Sky Art Conference, an ongoing series of conferences and events directed toward humanist and aesthetic explorations of sky and space. In her current research, she seeks a means to visualize vision loss and to create visual language and a poetry of visual experiences for people like herself whose sight is limited.

Goldring graduated cum laude from Smith College and received an M.Ed. from Harvard University. She lives with her husband, Otto Piene, in Groton, Massachusetts, and Düsseldorf, Germany.

A recorded interview with this author is available from New Letters on the Air.