A collaboration between poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and artist Dina Chang, Chang’s visuals provide a stunning photographic take on Bertram’s poem “The Body Deformed by Tidal Forces.” The poem is a muscular lyrical meditation on the physics of tidal forces that simultaneously create solidity and changes of season through rotation and gravitational push/pull and threaten destruction when the same forces of these rotating celestial bodies are brought into too close a contact to sustain their individual integrities. The same phenomenon, Bertram suggests, literally and figuratively applies to earth-bound human bodies and the ways people too are bound to an ungodly planet spinning ferociously through the cosmos.
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram x Dina Chang
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The Body Deformed by Tidal Forces
Darkness still here, hunkered against the trees.
Spring so uneasy this year.
No matter morning’s boundary culling our bodies,
another romantic passage assaults us!
O limp future centered on this body!
In the model solar system, planets suspend & twirl
as if from a spider’s whirl.
The quantum in backpedal, in decline, spring so un-
gripping this year. Bored mouth. Bored fingers.
The umpteenth day/night running like such—
truly, truly—this troubling with physics!
Not still winter, not yet anything.
O thuggish awakening.
All planets but this one were named after gods.