from the Afterword:

Along with Greek, the mother tongue I give my children is the self-authoring in the work I make. And the perspective the children have given me, from witnessing them at each age and reflecting back on where I found myself at each – a perspective I’ve cultivated in One/Two - is that the rich interiority of childhood carries one well beyond the brief moment of youth. The experiences of the young self in the worlds we come from and outgrow, can nourish us still. When I look at this book completed, I see One/Two as a collection of votive images, and its prose poems as a chronicling of self-making; the making of the self from the intuitions of girlhood carried into the present, and the making of sense as a collection of aesthetic experiences. The sense I’m driven to make is varied, but it’s themes connected: How are one’s aesthetic inclinations formed over time? How does one unfold as a political being? How do the sometimes invisible ways we care for each other, or create knowledge, invest in our own making of freedom? What experimentations, rehearsed in community, help us expand the possibilities we believe exist for ourselves? These rehearsals toward autonomy, or dignity, or sense-making - what we might call practices of freedom - might be enacted in any of the spaces we find ourselves in, material or abstract: in our neighborhoods, in our ancestry, in friendships, through decadence, outside the law, in nurturing our children, in coping mechanisms, in experiencing grief, or in our imaginations. It is this question of how we fashion our own utopias out of situations of dispossession, or how the marginalized become cultural producers, that grounds my creative practice and my interests as a maker. Art and art forms born of exclusion are one of the great American stories, after all, and one I hold as an inheritance.