Zolang je niet zo over problemen praat zie je er toch niks van / As long as you don’t talk about problems so much you won’t see them anyway is a photobook about empathy in psychiatry. Portraits of people in conversation and observations in body language are combined with textual dialogues. This project originated during a residency in Het Vijfde Seizoen, the residency on the terrain of a psychiatric institution in Den Dolder, NL. In the book you are made to ponder the (in)ability to place yourself into another’s shoes, the absurdity of mental illness as well as the familiarity and humanity of those who suffer from voices in their head, delusions, psychoses and depression. The title is a quote from one of the portrayed patients and brings to doubt the work itself and the possibility to photograph something that is so complicated.

This volume assesses a wonderful body of work that encompasses installations, films, artist’s books and specimens from the artist’s vast archives of ephemera. Like Marcel Broodthaers and Susan Hiller, Bloom has a creative attraction toward taxonomy and museology: the installation “Greed” (1988), for instance, is comprised of a chair, an empty frame and a photograph of a museum gallery with a seated guard. An example of one of her own collections is a complete set of Vladimir Nabokov’s writings for which Bloom redesigned all of the book covers, referring both to herself and Nabokov as collectors (he obsessively collected editions of his own books) and in the process interposing herself as artist. In some cases, Bloom revisits previous installations to add new elements, resisting and upsetting the orderliness of a conventional artistic chronology. The Collections of Barbara Bloom includes essays by Dave Hickey and Susan Tallman and expands a project developed as part of Bloom’s Wexner Art Center Residency Award in 1998.

Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus (then Soviet Union), and has lived in the USA since 2006. She is the author of FACTORY OF TEARS and COLLECTED BODY (Copper Canyon Press; and for the German language, Surkamp Verlag). Mort is a recipient of Crystal of Vilenica, Burda Poetry Prize for Eastern European authors, Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, and Bess Hokin Prize.

Published by Fivehundred places, founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.

Roger Reeves’ work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Tin House, and The Paris American. His debut collection of poetry, King Me, was published in 2013 by Copper Canyon Press and was honored as a Library Journal “Best Poetry Book of 2013”. Reeves has been awarded a 2015 Whiting Award, a 2013 NEA Fellowship, a 2013 Pushcart Prize and a 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Reeves was the 2014-2015 Hodder Fellow of Princeton University, and is currently an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Published by Fivehundred places, founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.

Noelle Kocot is the author of six books of poetry, most recently, Soul In Space (Wave Books, 2013). Kocot also translated Tristan Corbiere’s poems from French which appear in a book called Poet By Default (Wave 2011). She is the recipient of numerous awards for her poems, including The American Poetry Review, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Literary Foundation, The Fund for Poetry and The Academy of American Poets. Kocot’s work has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Poetry 2001, 2012 and 2013 and Postmodern Poetry: A Norton Anthology.

Published by Fivehundred places, founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.

Michael Dickman was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. His poems regularly appear in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, and elsewhere. He is the author of two books of poems, The End of the West, and Flies, which won the James Laughlin Award.

Published by Fivehundred places, founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.