Dance artist and poet Cori Kresge, in the introduction to her Combustion Suite cycle (Bored Wolves, 2023, with art by Sanya Kantarovsky), explains of the collection’s process and poems—the “word-skin my body has shed”—in which are revealed the salon’s feral fringes:
“After I perform a dance, I write a poem. This is my most truthful account of that experience.” However, she caveats: “Dance time has its own elusive logic which is even more distorted and compressed when reinterpreted in poetry. I wonder how to make these dance poems more familiar and approachable, more like my regular personality. But it seems that when I dance I am not me. I am emptied. I become an observer, a satellite, an animal, an oracle, a current, a lens. I can only try to tell you what happened.”
In “Trio in Forest,” Cori can be seen as entering as a flame. But one who, I suspect, if the woods were to ask, would self-extinguish on the spot. And bats would laugh & laugh.
