Things to do in the Green Zone

Above: Fresh in the mail, my wife Elisabeth holding the new publication fourW nineteen, published by the Booranga Writers’ Centre in Waga Waga, New South Wales, Australia! Her recent poem, Things to do in the Green Zone, is included within this ambitious collection of contemporary international writing. Mabrouk!

Above: The poem on the page. Geotypografika readers will remember some of Elisabeth’s previous postings under Site Q. This poem was inspired by both contemporary events and her experiences living in Qatar (see also Opolis). A humbly dynamic experiment with both structure, meaning, and form, Elisabeth offers this insight to her writing:

“I wanted to collage and improvise upon some interviews with and online ‘essays’ by people living in the so-called Green Zone in Baghdad. The driving fascination was the eerie similarity between the descriptions of life there and compound-life in Doha, and what I imagine to be the barricaded world collapsed (e.g. the front page of a newspaper depicting atrocities next to an ad for expensive watches).”

Above: An example of the aforementioned front page from London’s Asharq Al-Awsat, featured recently in Front Page Horror.

Above: The poem again from Elisabeth’s original typing. (Click for a larger view.) Carefully constructed, it can be read in a variety of directions with, in my own pedestrian view, surprising cohesion and resonance. Third-culture perspectives will recognize this as well. Below: An snapshot from one of several ongoing typographic experiments with the poem via tÿpøgrafika.