FINALIST FOR THE 2023 DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZEWays of Seeing meets Mary Ruefle in these visualartinflected poems Though they started from Sheryda Warreners impulse to see herself more clearly the poems in Test Piece ended up becoming more expansive meditations on seeing and vision. They engage with the process and practice of artmaking and specifically with abstract minimalist works like those by Eva Hesse Anne Truitt Ruth Asawa and Agnes Martin. Notseeingnotknowing is a motif as is weave grid pattern rhythm of interiors domestic life. These poems are informed by collage by the act of bringing images and lines together. With their echoes and reverberations hand mirror body clear form face a greater complexity is revealed.In conversation with visual art mirrors and the traces of self we assemble through encounter Sheryda Warreners Test Piece holds an expansive place to dwell with the phenomenological. Interacting with event and object reflection and parataxis the writing asks us to consider contingent spaces and the matter of matter and meaning making. The poems adhere as arrangement as a consideration of relationality. What does she whimper in the dogs ear How earthly we behave believing were alone. Hoa Nguyen author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your TreasureSheryda Warreners newest poetry collection unspools as a complex weave of repeated motifs ritualistic gestures and deeply embodied observations. Im especially struck by the influence of twentiethcentury women artists within the collection meditations on Eva Hesse Agnes Martin and Sherrie Levines works structure much of Test Piece. Palimpsests of photographed interiors where living and writing collide lyrically and randomly combine with floating textual cutups of variegating transparency. This concretizes perhaps how the poems bloom forth from experimental assemblage her body holdsthe long blue sentence of it... Marina Roy artist and author of Queuejumping