Moon Kissed, Myth Forged: Karen Pierce Gonzalez and the Elemental Power of Story

Reanimating the sublime spirit of the mythic storyteller

Guest Reviewer: Glenn Barker

Moon Kissed Earth Wrought Vision Drunk, “for the ancient among us who remain forever new”, is the striking new work of Karen Pierce Gonzalez, an award-winning writer and artist from the San Francisco North Bay area. Her chapbooks include Coyote in the Basket of My Ribs (Kelsay Books) and Down River with Li Po (Black Cat Poetry Press). In this short pamphlet of poetry and art she explores our bonds with our mythic past and their synchronicities of spirit, thus reconnecting us with that union through her work. As an artist she animates the joy of colour, rendered in her natural found objects and assemblages, the pulse of an ethnographer of folk intuition and creation.

This is poetry of a transcendental nature and imagery of a folk artist who knows what unites us when we look beyond our own skin and reason – hearing the voice of the innate and elemental deep within us all, but long forgotten. Creative clarity, raw insights and emotions reflect the mystical nature of her poems and form the visual bridges that ground her intuitive practice. Moon Kissed is the mythical and dreamtime journey towards three Mesopotamian women, goddesses from the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is a compact work of nine poems, presented in five sections, with each section prefaced by an assemblage, opening the voices of these women journeying through their allegorical dreamscapes and realities.

We open with an assemblage, earth meeting heaven, leading us into the dialogue we will hear between each woman and her ‘creator’. The single poem in this section, I Wake At Midnight, takes us the dawn of creation itself, as if narrated by a storyteller or an oral tradition dream interpreter, and introduces our three goddesses: Ninsun, Shiduri and Shamhat.  There is no explicit drama in these poems; we are instead held by the dramatic retelling by our spirit storyteller of conversations like our own inner voices or those heard when we are dreaming. They are ‘conversations’ of profound emotional depth with our goddesses fully immersed in the concerns of god-earth life.

‘Ninsun: Maternal’, is wise and nurturing, the earthly godhead of motherhood, a maternal essence. Her consciousness is the troubled existence of all women, god or human. We are inside her thoughts, her inner voice, calling the poet as narrator to gain form and the destiny written on her body. ‘I might go back into the shadows of your womb / where safety is a hidden pocket / Tucked away from those who would chattel me’ […] ‘I search for the umbilical cord between us / but again you scoot me back out into the world’

‘Shiduri: broth of truth’ is woman of wisdom and magic; a mead, ‘a brew of Babylonian blue moon flowers’ the inspirational fountain of her wisdom. It is a drink of divine sustenance, one that ‘momentarily fills the gaps in my knowing / then slips out of my pores as stardust / on even the haziest nights’

Shamhat is the sacred temple lover, concubine.  We are bathed in her dreamtime conscience, the momentum of her body a river, a flow of pleasure, an elemental water nourishing the incarnate joy of life. ‘You alone quench me – / rains of your water/ saturate every unwritten page / every incomplete sculpture I start’.

Moon Kissed mines the lost echoes of our mythic cultural inheritance; how we once spoke and sang and danced to the rhythm of our oneness with each other, with our folk art and folklore shorn of grandiose pomp and purpose. In this, we are held, simple, pure and direct, making our way back into the richness of our discarded radiance. It is a short poetical work of art and word that nevertheless leaves us forever wanting to know and experience more.