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Fluency: A Collection of Asemic Writing

by Karla Van Vliet

Asemic writing is a wordless form of writing, an art form offering an impression or abstraction of conventional physical writing. In Fluency, we see a union of Karla Van Vliet’s lifelong practices of art and poetry, each dissolving into the other and resurfacing as asemic writing in full flower. Here are thirty-seven images, thirty-seven pieces of literary expression that extend far beyond literary convention, accompanied by Van Vliet’s personal insights and remarks. In her words: “There are times when I do not have words. Yet I have the need and desire to write. It is to asemic writing that I turn in these moments. To the gesture of writing. . . . In the branching tree limbs, in the waves, in my hand’s scratching across paper, we each read the feeling that rises in us.”

POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-951651-47-3 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2020952780

Released February 2021

Copyright 2021

64 pages

Author Biography

Karla Van Vliet is the author of From the Book of Remembrance and The River from My Mouth, collections of poetry and paintings, both published by Shanti Arts; and a poem-length chapbook, Fragments: From the Lost Book of the Bird Spirit, published by Folded Word. Van Vliet’s book She Speaks in Tongues, a collection of poems and asemic writings, is forthcoming from Anhinga Press. She is an Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize finalist, and a three-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Poet Lore, The Tishman Review, Green Mountains Review, Crannog Magazine, and others.

Van Vliet’s paintings have been featured in Women Asemic Writers, UTSANGA.IT, Still Point Art Quarterly, Stone Voices Magazine, Champlain’s Lake Rediscovered, and Gate Posts with No Gate: The Leg Paint Project. She is a member of WAAVe Global (Women Asemic Artists & Visual Poets) and Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate.

Karla is a co-founder and editor of deLuge Journal. She is an Integrative Dreamwork analyst, artist, and administrator of the New England Young Writers’ Conference at Bread Loaf, Middlebury College. Karla lives in Vermont.

Endorsements

“I have always thought of Karla’s work as other-worldly. These images invoke bodies and resistance to silence—to not be silenced. Asemic writing here is not the absence of meaning, but the beginning of experience through translation. The images paired with prose, a process and a journey, are bonded and yet hint at a frayed universe where silence is Queen and desire holds her in hand. The reflection of a collective trauma of the times and a personal one swing up and down, brandish and enlighten a space, and create a postponed feminine literacy emerging in a strange new world. A truly remarkable and necessary collection to add to a growing field of asemics and visual poetry.”
—Kristine Snodgrass, author of American Apparell

“Subtly tinted and textured, Van Vliet’s markings seem much older than they are—fragments from a lost civilization, wiser than ours. Each page is worth a prolonged contemplation.”
— Peter Schwenger, author of Asemic: The Art of Writing

Articles and Reviews

Jane Edberg, Let that Bird Out to Fly: The Art, Asemic Writing, and Poetry of Karla Van Vliet, Medium, March 31, 2023

“Short Takes on Five Vermont Books,” Seven Days, June 23, 2021

Sylvia Van Nooten, “GAS Featured Artist: Karla Van Vliet,” GAS: Poetry, Art and Music, March 13, 2021