two poems

The Message

All works which should be opened twenty years after my death carry the sign +x

--Hilma af Klint

from Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation

“Thought-Forms” are inspired by the watercolor illustrations found in the book Thought-Forms by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater (1901). The book was found in af Klint’s library and considered influential to many of her peers and future abstract painters. Each illustration is a representation of the emotional aura around a person in different life circumstances (at a funeral, at a shipwreck, street accident, gambler, etc).

Sarah Mangold is the author of the chapbook The Atom (Wave Books, 2023), inspired by Swedish artist and medium Hilma af Klint. Her poetry books include Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners (Fordham University Press, 2021), selected by Cynthia Hogue for the POL Prize, Giraffes of Devotion (Kore Press, 2016), Electrical Theories of Femininity(Black Radish Books, 2015) and Household Mechanics (New Issues, 2002), selected by C.D. Wright for the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is currently working on a book of poems about the life and work of artist Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz.

Issue 14