Valerie Witte is the author of multiple poetry and hybrid books, including A Rupture in the Interiors (Airlie, 2023), a game of correspondence (Black Radish, 2015), and, in collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal, The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating System, 2019), the first of a two-part project exploring the work of postmodern dancer-choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. The second book in the project, a collection of experimental essays, is One Thing Follows Another (punctum books, forthcoming 2024). She has also published multiple chapbooks, most recently Listening Through the Body (above/ground press, 2021). Her previous collaborations include projects with artist Jennifer Yorke, who produced two artist books based on Witte's manuscript Flood Diary and an installation based on her manuscript A Rupture in the Interiors. The works were exhibited in Berkeley and Chicago, respectively, and their collaboration included a residency at La Porte Peinte Center for the Arts in Noyers, France. Witte edits education books in Portland, OR, where she lives with her husband, Andrew.

Other poems by Valerie Witte in Verse Daily:

Other poems on the web by Valerie Witte:
Two poems
from a game of correspondence
Five poems

Valerie Witte's Website.

Valerie Witte on Twitter.

About A Rupture in the Interiors:

"Valerie Witte's ambitious, densely associative poems offer a 'tissue of stories unfolding' in which she reinvents the very nature of skin: as map, as strata, as a process of reckoning. Here, Witte takes on the challenge of embodiment, its coils and fugitive film, bringing the reader into a richly lyrical disorientation."
—Elizabeth Robinson

"A RUPTURE IN THE INTERIORS reads like an archaeological excavation where artifacts reveal themselves in unexpected combinations, torn from the contexts that would explain their presence. There's a larger story below the surface, lost or dispersed, beyond the reach of our excavation. That muted story divulges as it withholds, tantalizing us with uncertainty, impelling us to try to fill in the gaps between the details set before us."
—Mary Burger

"Valerie Witte's poems record the aftermaths of the human body's ruptures, including interiors suddenly visible. Punctuation's vertical bars and brackets become visual poetry for scars and wounds. What's articulated in between are metaphors for what else exists in the universe, both physically outside as well as psychologically inside. Thus, Witte's poems accomplish poetry's most empathetic aspiration: that to bring a poem into the world is to bring the world into a poem."
—Eileen R. Tabios

"The wonder of this book is how it makes one feel as though one is holding not page, not book, but the fine texture of skin itself. Ultimately, this book strikes the song of the body's largest and most visible organ, where we are the most vulnerable, where we first appear, then finally disappear where 'we are almost human anyway."
—Gillian Conoley