Crush by Janet Lees
This recent film by Manx videopoet (and Moving Poems regular) Janet Lees was featured along with two others in the newly re-launched Issue One/Spring 2022 issue of Atticus Review.
CRUSH: Artist’s Statement: The poem at the heart of this videopoem is a reflection on the less lovely, more violent realities of ‘young love.’ Like many young people, I was subject to all-consuming crushes as a teenager. Infatuation can make you do anything; rejection can make you feel as though you’ve been turned inside-out and left for dead. Like many women, I have also experienced sexual oppression and violence. I found the doll in a bucket in a junk shop. She appears in the film exactly how I found her, without skirt or trousers. Her exposed and seemingly vulnerable state spoke powerfully to me. As we were driving back from the junk shop I put her on the dashboard and it just looked right, recalling dreams of being in a driverless car, with no control over my fate. The poem was originally published in my collection ‘A bag of sky,’ from Frosted Fire Press.
A great example of how serendipity and something like ekphrasis can produce works of extraordinary power when the poet is also the filmmaker.
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
