The connection between poetry and its Greek root, poieîn—to make—is vital in my work. Reszies is a consummate maker. Experiencing the materiality of text and textile, her creative practice seeks to enact and expand liminal spaces with attention to marginality, dailyness, and domestic arrangements. She has discovered that it is natural for her to make poems in a series: a continuous present, beginning again and again. Of Water & Other Soft Constructions is composed of three poetic sequences: fragments stitched together with sutras/sutures in a patchwork/construction of shadow and light.

Heidi Reszies is a poet and transdisciplinary artist. She earned an MFA in Writing with a concentration in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and was a 2015 James Merrill Poetry Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry collection Illusory Borders is from the Operating System 2019. She is the founding creator/curator of Artifact Press, and currently resides in Richmond, Virginia where she teaches letterpress printing at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. Find her at heidireszies.com.

"'Wake up,' commands Heidi Reszies, in this fine-spun collection, “we’re here.” Of Water & Other Soft Constructions introduces a poet who can turn her lines like an Olympic luger, getting more out of each breath than you might think she ought. Verbs tense toward now; nouns collectivize the dull promise of universality. An almost-narrative moment begins to form, then refuses us. Find futurity in the way Reszies forevers each line into 'incipient bloom,' in how she engages her solemnity of white space through sound and syntax. Recollections become 'museum' while 'moon phases' are a thing one becomes. Compounds images enchant our expectations. The poet shows her work, 'a process not a fixed condition,' as analog thread stitching toward the reader’s own location. Is this her magic? In naming her constraints, Reszies activates a kind of liberation that lets us really reckon with what poems can do." -- Samiya Bashir, author of Field Theories