Books:
Minor Chord
Ravenna Press, 2023
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“In Minor Chord, Joan Fiset’s poems and Liz Gamberg’s collages explore the slip- page of time, the fracturing of nature, the slow, unavoidable diminishment of self. But don’t let the title fool you. Yes, there’s a melancholy here, but also a joy and playfulness in the construction and the conversation. A truly evocative and un- forgettable work.” -Hasanthika Sirisena, Dark Tourist
“A curious sort of weather spreads across this book, and we are gifted downpours of surprising image-both actual and textual-and striking observation. ‘we revise toward green’ writes Joan Fiset, and there si little doubt she does. This book is verdant with unanticipated turns of phrase and natural observations.”
-Kyle McCord, Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult
How It Looks Away From Here
Ravenna Press, 2020
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Heavy Feather Review, “How It Looks Away from Here” reviewed by Robert Dunsdon
Praise for How It Looks Away From Here ~
“Have you ever wondered what wonder is? Poetry and photography can mediate trembling tendrils of wonder as well explore how wonder works. Infinite cosmos squeezed into infinitesimal moments within and without. How do books with images and words capture this? They don’t. They release it in their own ways, as this one does. Moment after moment opening bits of felt-sensed realities very much on planet earth.” — Michael Eigen, author of The Challenge of Being Human, Under the Totem in Search of a Path, The Sensitive Self
“How It Looks Away from Here occupies a space of precision, of blur and slant. This arresting collaboration of poems and photographs embodies the ineffable. its impact reverberates long after reading.” — Sarah Townsend, author of Setting the Wire: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis
“The images next to the poems are so resonant. That chipped doll’s face! Time seeps and buckles and makes a new shape in these pages.” — Bhanu Kapil
How it Was With Scotland
Ravenna Press, 2019
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Praise for How It Was with Scotland ~
“These pictures and words are like overheard whispers or something you almost see from the corner of your eye, or maybe even more intimate than that, like things you are hearing from inside someone’s head before they are words, or memories of things they cannot quite remember. Like secret inside rustlings of longing, hope, regret and quiet beauty.” — Rebecca Brown, Not Heaven, Somewhere Else
How It Was with Scotland creates a frisson of ordinary, sensory moments with unthinkable time sequences. Whatever has been named vanishes; whatever has been exiled appears on the next horizon. Fiset’s poetics, comprised of incomplete phrases (words spoken as though overheard, half-recalled, unsayable in entirety), creates a strange sense of our knowing our way around a world that exists truly, yet can’t be found. Reading these poems, memory becomes something that cannot be known or named directly- as it casts itself into lyric and repeats.
“Saterstrom’s paintings are the perfect accompaniment to this poetics of incompletion. What we see is instantly recognizable, and even so, each image evokes the invisible, a dimension of the not to be seen-that we fill in as actually there.” — Annie Rogers, A Shining Affliction
Namesake
Blue Begonia Press
My mother was named after Joan of Arc. I am named after my mother.She used to tell me stories of the peasant girl who never learned to read. When she milked the cows she heard voices telling her to save France. She wore a suit of armor as she rode on horseback holding the French flag high as she led the soldiers into war. My mother said she was burned at the stake, and I used to imagine her tied to a wooden pole while tongues of fire licked her ankles then moved upward until the red flames and smoke consumed her. I envisioned her looking up to the sky, as if somehow she understood this horrible thing happening to her. When my mother said Joan of Arc was born to save her country her voice grew serious and calm. She said she became Saint Joan because of her suffering. She talked about Joan of Arc as if we were she and she was us.
Now the Day is Over
Blue Begonia Press
Winner of the 1997 King County Arts Commission Publication Award
Selected by Rebecca Brown
“At the center of Joan Fiset’s exquisitely written memoir is a heartbreaking family secret the child knows but must not tell out loud. I read Now The Day Is Over in one fell swoop. Hypnotic, controlled yet wildly imaginative, it is one of the most disturbing and beautiful accounts of childhood I’ve ever read.” — Jane Shore
“Both comforting and unsettling. For all the domestic terrors at the heart of it, it is a quiet, intimate book that unfolds in a gentle, unraveling manner, gaining much of its power through its muted tone and persistent gradual revealing.” — Jim Heynen
Online Publications and Interview:
Private Eye Loupe
Private Eye Loupe Essay 1997
Interview with Selah Saterstrom & Poems
Prose:
White Streak
Poems:
Ricochet
Essays:
The Sadness of a Clown
Collaborations:
Ignis Fatuus – Images by Sabrina Roberts
Assisi: An Online Literary Journal of Arts & Letters, Volume 4 – Joan Fiset and Sabrina Roberts, Pgs 72-78
Presentation:
IFPE Presentation