City Companions
hybrid poetry & art micro pamphlet
Marcelle Newbold &
Karen Pierce Gonzalez
City Companions explores city life focusing on four districts: Underground, Downtown, Uptown, and Outskirts. These collage and poem ‘companions’ capture the evocative tension between decay and hope. In Downtown: the remnants of a night out. In Outskirts: a woman finding peace sheds her limitations. Perfect for readers seeking a meditation on resilience, connection, and the beauty of life.
Marcelle Newbold & Karen Pierce Gonzalez’s first hybrid collaboration, City Companions is the latest iteration of their creative relationship. Marcelle’s poems originate from her practice as an Architect and interrogation of space manifesting into place. Karen’s art work reflects a layered, intuitive interplay with the physical world.
Click this link to pre-orderMany thanks to Mark and Hedgehog Press, for choosing our pamphlet as joint winners of The Little Black Book Poetry Pamphlet Competition. The other winner was Carmella de Keyser. Hedgehog Poetry Press
Bios
Marcelle Newbold’s work explores the intersection between nature, the places we inhabit, and the spaces between. A Bridport Prize shortlisted, Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominated poet, she has been published by Propel, Ink Sweat & Tears, Indigo Dreams, Icefloe Press and others. Her 'Arcade hopping'; poem is on permanent display in the Cardiff City Centre. Former Managing Editor for several literary journals, Council member for the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, she has acted as Guest Editor for Feral and Black Bough Poetry. An architect, she tutors at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff, Wales.
Karen Pierce Gonzalez is a self-taught artist and an award-winning writer. Six of her 50+ published art images have appeared as magazine covers, including Chestnut Review and, FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art. Her intuitive mixed-media and assemblage artworks have been exhibited in West Coast art and museum galleries, including Finley Center (California) and Truckenbrod Gallery (Oregon). Several of her hybrid (art/poetry) videos have been published. A 2022 National Arts Program Featured Artist (USA), she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California where she also writes award-winning poetry and edits the Ekphrastic Folk Art blogzine.
Advanced praise
City Companions is a hybrid micro chap of powerful writing and incredible artwork that delivers provocative thought and imagery with both a sense of urgency and overarching humanity. Marcelle Newbold’s poems, important and eloquently delivered, are paired strikingly with a rainbow of Karen Pierce Gonzalez’s nuanced naturalistic imagery. Eco-poetically, the work insightfully communicates layers of city life familiar to most of us and does so as a guide that is unique and engaging.
This is a tiny book that packs a wealth of implications, both compassionate and questioning. In it, the visual and the verbal spark at bold oblique angles to each other – the textured colours vivid and elusive, the words ambushing them through all the senses with sharp caught details, hints of lives and narratives.