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Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer is a poet and installation artist in St. Louis. She is the author of Cleavemark (BOAAT Press, 2016), a full-length collection of poems selected by Shane McCrae. Schlaifer has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her poems and art have appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Harvard Review, Georgia Review, AGNI, The Offing, Denver Quarterly, LIT, Colorado Review, Fence, and elsewhere. She frequently collaborates with other artists, most recently with Cheryl Wassenaar on the installation Cleavemark Drive. Her work can be viewed at criticalbonnet.com. Links to various poems can be found here on her website: criticalbonnet.com/poems/ Links to more images from Cleavemark Drive and select poems from Cleavemark can be found at The Offing. Cleavemark can be purchased from BOAAT Press or Small Press Distribution.
[…] Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer is nearly finished with her second manuscript. It is a series of poems imagining the brain as a collection of governing bodies overseeing specific functions of the mind. She works as a poet, installation artist, and visual artist often combining the three roles allowing them to inform each other. For her first book, Cleavemark, she worked with artist Cheryl Wassenaar to create installation pieces reflecting the poems. The book is a lament for her grandmother who was tragically killed when Ellis Schlaifer was eleven years old. Often, her poems juxtapose images of beauty with the grotesque as in the poem We All Wanted the Same Things but Things Ripped, “Golden avenues of sunset light/Gold in every helping of rotting flesh/The birds came to feast upon.” […]