Golden Record by Rosemary Valero-O’Connell is a fascinating mixed media approach to comics

Let’s get this out of the best way earlier than we get into it: Rosemary Valero-O’Connell’s new work, Golden Record, is an summary, figurative chapbook, so it’s wealthy with florid poetry and infrequently visceral introspection. If that’s not your cuppa, right here’s the door.

Okay? Ok.

Those of you left to hear of Valero-O’Connell’s lauded, rococo experiment in phrases and photos, please observe me, and know this guide is in the end a crystal-coalesced zine of patreon updates, so the ultimate kind is extra a report of moments, and maybe not a defined, structured album of expression. In this type, it is, because the identify suggests, exhibiting some gold it’s discovered whereas recording.

But earlier than we delve into Golden Record’s construction and themes, let me describe how I skilled this album. It is my perception that graphic experiments are greater than the sum of their web page rely and solely wholly full when interacted with by the reader. It’s on this perception that how we learn and work together with its medium does the complete curvature of its expertise (and design) reveal itself to us.

I learn this after my accomplice did, who advised me I had to expertise this whereas listening to some Zoé or Señor Kino — a report to spin whereas I spun this report. I opted for Señor Kino’s surf punk dream pop album, Aurora Boreal, to information me by means of this poem collection. Really! I even selected headphones over audio system for an intimate learn, as a result of it appeared becoming. Ultimately, the mixture of sound, visible, and Golden Record’s verbose prose took me on a sensory roadtrip that helped illuminate its work moderately than accompany.

Golden Record clocks in at 44 pages with 8 pages for the covers/endpapers and 18 double web page spreads. On our first unfold, what can greatest be described as a desk of contents helps us mentally chop these collection of splashes into three cogent and thematic chapters. Personally, I discovered these three chapters to concentrate on: a) the ache we glance to overlook, b) the ache we conceal (and never extremely properly, however that’s okay), and c) what this was all for (trace: it’s love).

For Golden Record’s runtime, Valero-O’Connell embraces a mixed media approach to her comedian juxtaposition. Swirling photoimagery gasping on the final wisps of the Baroque motion, mushy radial and translucent field gradients, warped lineart, complementing frames, distinction symbolism, and stanzas organized atop, inside, by means of, beneath, and earlier than accompanying illustration — all manners Valero-O’Connell felt compelled to organize this manicured theatre for you, the reader.

Golden Record, very similar to the world outdoors its vacuum, asks a lot upfront with no recourse. From its repeated illustration of the physique (female) as fruit/meat to its vitriol for unrequited romantic trysts, now we have to kind our personal interpretations of the work or wallow in its ethereal vibe. Hell, my accomplice didn’t benefit from the repeated biblical allusions nor the considerably wood Spanglish at play. I, nevertheless, thought the underlying themes/aesthetic of faith helped codify what Golden Record had to say about household, love, and physique. Now, it is banal for me to sermonize that poems are meant to be interpreted, so let me talk some consistencies my home has discovered (and be happy to share your personal interpretations):

Golden Record needs you, the reader, to really feel the ache of a being pregnant scare, an abusive relationship, not patching issues up with a father or mother earlier than it’s too late, grieving unconsummated guarantees, alcoholism, sexual assault, residing fully off spite, being married to a cultural fetishist, a unending checklist of vices, and a final gasp handful of pandemic period guilt and rejuvenation. Sure, on the floor, these are all essentially the most triggering ideas most people can safely conjure with out inducing a backslide, however Valero-O’Connell’s prose by no means goals to drench us in a reminder, however moderately lends a guiding hand out of that specified darkness and or straight to its throat.

Between the mushy violence of severed fruit, flesh and object as corpse, and repeated use of matches (burnt and unburnt), Golden Record casts a significant and welcome examination on introspection that drives one to additional self-motivated remedy moderately than to pig out on candy-coated catharsis. In its setlist, Golden Record deftly weaves detailed conversation-starter spreads into an opulent meditation on self. What Valero-O’Connell lays to relaxation on this chapbook is a gilded historical past of emotions we’re lucky sufficient to be privy to — a good graphic album recording ideas as ephemeral as they’re everlasting. All that’s left to do is expertise its shine for your self.

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