“yellow stars and crocuses”

This April, National Poetry Month, knife | fork | book at The Great Escape Book Store [KFB EAST] has collaborated with poet/artist Jessica Hiemstra to welcome the launch of The Thinking Heart: The Etty Drawings (1983-1984) Claire Wilks, printed and bound by Baseline Press for Exile Editions.

This will include an installation of broadsides, panels, and ephemera connected to the chapbook on display, free and open to the public, 08 – 24 April 2022, as well as the debut of KFB The Living Room Series featuring a conversation between Jessica Hiemstra and Anne Michaels to be recorded before a live audience, then posted, both online and as part of the installation.

“Etty throws a postcard from the window of a train that brings her to a concentration camp. This is an act of faith and despair… faith that even if no one reads it it’s still worth sending.

Reading Etty’s notes and letters, stepping into Claire’s drawings, all these years later, I feel I found her letters and drawings in the grass beside the tracks and that I must do something too.”

– Jessica Hiemstra, from The Thinking Heart

“Reaching out of the past, pressing with love through atrocity, they [Etty/Claire] reveal our ability to be compassionate. No—more than that—to become compassion.” – Jessica Hiemstra, The Thinking Heart

JESSICA HIEMSTRA

The Thinking Heart: The Etty Drawings (1983-1984) Claire Wilks

Printed and bound by Baseline Press for Exile Editions, 2022

08 – 24 April 2022

KFB EAST at The Great Escape Book Store 957 Kingston Rd [Back Lane Space]