Reading Correspondences Through the Virtual Feminist Museum.

Correspondences, (2013) a collaboration between poet Anne Michaels and artist Bernice Eisenstein, exploits the multifaceted temporality of comics as a medium. The work offers a space of agency in the navigation of the space of the printed page, a phenomenal engagement with image, text, narrative and temporality. The folded accordion-like pages of Correspondences offer connections and configurations, made possible by the choice of directions in which the book can be read, and the page arrangements chosen by the reader upon any particular visit. As voices in a gallery of conversations, situated in the shadow of the Holocaust, Eisenstein’s portraits show us the faces of connected figures, from Paul Celan to Nelly Sachs, while the fragmented text of the poem sets up associations and relationships across time. They have produced a work that is an experimental comic, exploring the possibilities of a printed object, which is simultaneously a book of poetry that has learned from comics. This article makes use of Griselda Pollock’s theoretical model of the Virtual Feminist Museum to explores the themes of memory, subjectivity and history that are encountered in the book, and the configurations of image, text and page that generate them.