
“In I, Coleoptile Ann Cotten (b.1982, Iowa, USA) moves the ironic play with authorship and formal experiments of previous projects to the background and opts for a more intimate approach. At the suggestion of publisher Broken Dimanche Press she has written her first comprehensive collection of poems in English for which she has also collaborated with the Austrian artist Kerstin Cmelka. The end result is a beautifully crafted book in which poems on the theme of ‘emergence’ are alternated with black and white photos that evoke scenes from the infamous 1918 Vladimir Mayakovsky film The Young Lady and the Hooligan,” writes Jan Pollet in De Reactor.
Ann Cotten has published numerous work including Fremdwörterbuchsonette (Suhrkamp) which won in the Reinhard-Priessnitz-Preis. She also published a book on concrete poetry Nach der Welt: Die Listen der Konkreten Poesie und ihre Folgen (Klever Verlag) in 2008. The same year saw her receive the George-Saiko-Reisestipendium and the Clemens Brentano Förderpreis für Literatur der Stadt Heidelberg. Her latest book came out in August from Suhrkamp and is called Florida-Räume. I, Coleoptile is her first full length book of work in English.
Kerstin Cmelka is a visual artist and was born in 1974 in Mödling, Austria. Most recently she has taken part in Cold Society at KW69, Berlin, Gestures – Performance and Sound Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark (2010), Scorpio’s Garden in the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin (2010) and Playing Homage, Contamporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2009).


