I’m very excited and honored to be reading from CHORUS with two poet/artist friends on March 30 at 7pm at Stelo Arts (412 NW 8th, Portland, OR).

https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781632431110

Thank you to Publisher’s Weekly for the glowing review of CHORUS:

“Whose afterimage am I?” Molnar asks in her striking debut. These poems interrogate how the self connects and relates to the world around it, and how these influences shape a larger picture. Each titled “chorus” followed by a number (“chorus 1/ air” and “chorus 6/ map/ there is no time but the light remains”), they capture voices in conversation and harmony/disharmony with each other, “I’ve noticed how many good hearts have to stop/ to keep me clothed and fed/ I’ve noticed the callouses on other hands/ the splinters in paw pads/ the burrs in black feathers that, elsewise, ought to fly.” Writers are frequently invoked, including Bayo Akomolafe (“In this epoch of porous boundaries, our bodies cannot be considered apart from the stories we tell of them”), Alice Notley, Nietzsche, and W.S. Merwin. Poems about Ojito Canyon (“light advances up the canyon named Ojito, little eye/ black scatter of magpies in deepening blue”) provide beautiful descriptions complicated by anxiety, “Worry seeps through the slightest crack. Keep/ the body. Thinking is a truceless act.” These poems do not deliver tidy answers to the dilemmas of existence, but rather investigate the division and fragmentation with lyric urgency.

Color is a topic I’ve been obsessed with for a long time. This essay explores the potentially world-changing links between ecology and chromophilia (love of color) via the work of Alma Thomas, Mark Rothko, the Wizard of Oz, Jorie Graham, David Batchelor, Milan Kundera, and more.

This essay was written as part of a residency sponsored by Stelo Arts and Variable West.

Chromophilia

I’m honored by this unique take on my art practice!

Kerri Politzer writes: “Daniela Molnar’s artistry has taken her down a circuitous path from ecology to scientific illustration to poetry. Now, it is leading her back to her Jewish roots. The artist and writer, who is the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors, is involved in multiple projects that address the Jewish experience from a variety of perspectives.”

Read the rest of the profile here:

https://www.jewishportland.org/jewishreview/jr-stories/artist-explores-light