Jessica Laser (born 1986, Chicago) is a poet and PhD student in English at the University of California, Berkeley. A graduate of Brown University and The Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has most recently taught writing at Brown, SUNY Purchase, and Parsons School of Design, where she taught collaboratively-designed seminars with visual artists. Her poems confront artistic problems typically allotted to visual media, particularly the painterly tension between abstraction and figuration, emphasizing the materiality of language in order to achieve (not disrupt) possible continuities of form. Her work has appeared in such publications as Boston Review, Hyperallergic, The Iowa Review, jubilat, Typo, and in two chapbooks: He That Feareth Every Grass Must Not Piss in a Meadow (paradigm press, 2016) and Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience (The Catenary Press, 2015). Letter Machine Editions will publish her first full-length collection, Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides, in 2019.
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