book art & design
Recent projects focus on art & design for anthologies and books by individual poets, including Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice , 2019, cover art; Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems, 2020, cover art & book design; Sheltering with Poems, 2021, cover & interior art; and We Eat to Rember: Soul Food Poetry, 2023, design and layout. I also design occasional broadsides, poetry cards, posters, and other ephemera and work with mixed media, monoprinting, letterpress, and collage.
art, design, poetry
poetry collections
Reliquary of Debt
ISBN-13: 978-1943170036
Available from the author or at Amazon
Reviewed in Grab the Lapels, Portage Magazine and Whale Review
Reliquary of Debt takes on the familiar topics of pilgrimage and travel in order to ask new questions about the intersections of parenting, god, economics, feminism, art, and culture.
Margaret Rozga, author of Justice, Freedom, Herbs, calls the collection “a tour de force of poetic innovation and fun.”
Kimberly Blaeser, author of Apprenticed to Justice, says that the book “invites the reader to re-see the art and artifacts of our culture. … “from ‘finger bones’ and frescoes to the Harry Potter Platform 9 ¾. The book awakens an awareness of everyday ‘debts’ we owe for the lushness of food and persistence of memory, for stories like that of Saint Zita’s miracle and the ones we create walking through our days together.”
Susan Firer notes the mix of “dense, inclusive, polyglot poems … with dance-party rhythms, fresh language and imagery, imagination and facts.”
Sonnets, syllabics, and Skypes; story and lyric; tradition and experiment; poetry and prose; old and new forms, including a sequence of factual-fictional “Wikiprosepoems” about the appearance of pumpkin in Italy and an architectural series that imitates Giotto’s Arena Chapel all figure in this collection, an extended meditation on worship and want. What do we abandon, leave behind, relinquish, and forsake as we journey with fellow travelers in mixed sympathy and antipathy? How do we keep moving forward and at what cost? What do we notice and what do we ignore? How many museums and churches does one family need to see? Who decides, and does it matter?
Cover art Erika Hibbert, Scattered Reliquary (detail)
Obstructed View
Fireweed Press 2009
Cover art Melissa Croghan
Reviews
A skilled wordsmith and storyteller, Wendy is also a consummate artist whose written poetry is the literary equivalent of a series of impressionist paintings of ordinary life events—but with words and lines instead of paints and canvas. Highly recommended for poetry readers who appreciate a touch of the 'avant garde' interpretations of the common place and the uncommon moment in verse.—Midwest Book Review, Volume 19, Number 9, September 2009
For as elsewhere in this impressive book, her real aim...is to chronicle how achievement of meaning and metaphor and insight rubs up against the forestalling claims of the material world and the quotidian, only to win out in the end, albeit in a cool, skeptical, obliquely minimal way. —K.P. Van Anglen, Religion and the Arts 14 (2010)
Rules of (dis)engagement, or Dubious perFormances
dancing girl press 2016
Chapbook
Rules of (dis)engagement, or Dubious perFormances, An Exhibit of Women Surreal Artists (2016) by myself & Sarah Sadie Busse is a faux-real catalog of women's art. One part essay. One part poem. One part angry. One part cheek.
edited anthologies
As an editor I have been interested in shaking up received paradigms and asking questions like what is a book? what is publishing? & what is a poem, anyway?
The micro press I co-founded with Sarah Busse, Cowfeather, developed out of editing & publishing Verse Wisconsin from 2009 to 2014. Cowfeather, which also hosted conversations and poetry-based digital projects, is on indefinite hiatus.
Two co-edited anthology projects, local ground(s)—midwest poetics (essays) and Echolocations, Poets Map Madison (poetry), embrace local content, local & social justice issues, and local ways of knowing.
selected writing online
poems
- Brain Mill Press, April 2023
- Poets.org, November 2021
- HIV Here and Now, January 2016
- Poemeleon, Summer 2015
- E-Ratio, Winter 2015
- Truck, November 2014
- Museum of Americana, Issue Six (Summer 2014)
- Unsplendid, Summer 2014, Special Issue on Women & Form
- Verse Wisconsin 113-114, April 2014
- Glass Seed Annual, Fall 2013
- Midway Journal, Fall 2013
- The Exquisite Uterus Project Exhibit, September 2013
- Paper Tape, Summer 2013
- New Verse News, Summer 2013
- Literary Bohemian, Summer 2013
- Verse Wisconsin 111, April 2013
- The Museum of Americana, Winter 2013
- Verse Wisconin 109, July 2012
- Mezzo Cammin, Winter 2012
- The Knox Writers' House Recording Project
- Prime Number 13, Fall 2011
- Whale Sound, 1/17/2011
- Poemeleon, Spring 2010
- Mezzo Cammin, Summer 2009
- qarrtsiluni, 2007 - 2013
essays
- Cowfeather Projects, 2016, text | texture | textile | tech
- Verse Wisconsin 113-114, 2014, (di)Verse Wisconsin: Community & Diversity, [with Sarah Busse]
- Verse Wisconsin 111, 2013, EveryMom: How—and Why—to Support Wisconsin Writers [with Sarah Busse]
- Verse Wisconsin 110, 2012, swaggacity in the heart land, or the hart that crosses a city street: notes from Hip Hop in the Heartland
- Verse Wisconsin 109, 2012, poetical economy/exchange: kitchens, coffee shops, cluttered tables, communities
- Verse Wisconsin 108, 2012, Our Expanding Dramaverse [with Greer DuBois]
- Verse Wisconsin 106, 2011, Poetic Justice: Books for Troubled Times, A Review-Essay
- Verse Wisconsin 105, 2011, Tradition & the Individual Sonnet, or Listen! Iambic Verse Has Variation
- Verse Wisconsin Main Street Issue, 2011, The Essay That I Begin Writing While Walking to the Wisconsin Capitol Trying to Discern the Right Question, 2/24/11
- Verse Wisconsin 104, 2010, god-xings: belief intersects Wisconsin poetry
interviews
- Profile of Margaret Rozga, Wisconsin People & Ideas, Winter 2019
- Kristy Bowen, Cowfeather Projects, June 2016
- Ann Engelman, Cowfeather Projects, April 2016
- Brenda Cárdenas, in Verse Wisconsin 109 (July 2012)
- Kimberly Blaeser, in Verse Wisconsin 107 (November 2011)
- Marilyn L. Taylor, in Verse Wisconsin 105 (March 2011)
- John Koethe, in Verse Wisconsin 104 (Fall 2010)
- Martín Espada, in Verse Wisconsin 103 (Summer 2010)
- Matthea Harvey, in Verse Wisconsin 102 (Spring 2010)
- Todd Boss, in Verse Wisconsin 101(Winter 2010)—excerpt here
- Farrideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi, in Eclectica Jan 2009
bio
Wendy Vardaman, PhD, has a day job managing websites and degrees in structural engineering, English, and graphic design. In addition to being a poet and the author of three poetry collections, her creative practice has focused on editing, prose writing, illustration, printmaking, and design. She enjoys learning new skills; exploring materials, media, and tools; doing research; making, mixing, coloring, and collaborating.
With Sarah Sadie she published Verse Wisconsin, created a micro-press, co-edited two anthologies, and served as Madison poets laureate from 2012 to 2015. She volunteers for arts and social justice causes as a designer, artist, and editor.
See a list of creative & academic publications, a resume, or an art & design portfolio for more information and work.