Collaboration with Eliot Cardinaux
Events are presented in "evolutionary" order, the absolute latest happenings are towards the bottom of the page.
Eliot Cardinaux's Facebook Post Dated April 30 2024:
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"I am pleased to announce that “Quiet Labor,” my second full-length poetry collection is due to be released very soon.
I have the wonderful and keen-eyed Ivy Schweitzer to thank for working very diligently with me to finalize the manuscript. The book is dedicated to the memory of my close friend and musical ally, Daniel Barritt-Levine, who passed away just over 2 years ago. This book has been in the works since the fall of 2021, and I’m grateful to be finally getting it off my chest. I will say, it’s had a long enough time to sit and have me tinker with it, that it now feels very much like a complete work of poetry to me; a finished book.
Amidst the recent chaos in the small press world, (Farewell, SPD), I’ve decided that in order to get this collection out into the world with my sanity still within reach, I’m going to release it myself through my own outlet, micro-press, and record label, The Bodily Press. This is a full-length, not a chapbook, and is perfect-bound, coming in at 72 pages. Take a look at the cover, (pictured), which features original artwork by Peter Knapp.
My former teacher, Ocean Vuong, has written something about the poems, which, needless to say, is a very deep honor for me. I will have copies available within the next month, and will be putting them up for sale on www.bodilypress.bandcamp.com ... You can likewise DM me if you’d like to pre-order one now. Sometimes removing the middle man is a better deal for everyone. I am grateful for the opportunity to share what’s most important to me through poetry, like so many *en arriere de moi*. Merci."
--Eliot Cardinaux
“Eliot is one of those rare poets who achieves poetry’s most challenging endeavor: to charge the gnomic lyric with immense sweeps in clarity of thought and feeling. These lines unravel and transform despite (or because of) their dissolution toward an elsewhere more estranged, and thereby more exhilarating, than their origins.”
--Ocean Vuong
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Eliot Cardinaux April 30th 2024 Poet & Pianist Website: https://eliotcardinaux.bandcamp.com
"I've been working with Peter Knapp in an improvised capacity for a couple of months now. We first met the week or so before his gallery opening at the Anchor House of Artists in Northampton, where his work stuck & moved me. I suggested that I play him some of my music, and we quickly decided that Gary Fieldman & I would perform some of our music at the opening night of Peter's show. We have since been in touch, and I've found him to be an ardent supporter of my work in poetry as well. He sent me an image of this painting last week, and asked if I'd be willing to compose a poem based around it. I had been working on a poem, "Horizons" that immediately sparked a connection with the painting when I saw it. I started work on trying to fine-tune the connection, and we have decided here to share our work together, for the first time, with one of my poems side by side with his painting, "Wonder's Wanderings." Let it move you in whatever way it will; I don't think there's a right or wrong way. See the poem and the image below."
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Eliot Cardinaux April 30th 2022 Poet & Pianist Website: https://eliotcardinaux.bandcamp.com
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HORIZON
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The earth is a whetstone
singing
incomparable words
As light eases into the blood
Lay dark & beating,
heart
in the grave the sky made
of apples
& the eyes of other
animals
redden in translation
Things that are leaving
after being said
begin to advertise the evening
Under the lindens
day will freeze up toward
Where if not far away
Eliot Cardinaux 12/4/2022 Facebook Post:
"Excited to announce 3 chapbooks in a series, now complete. A triptych of sorts. Each cover graced by a beautiful work of art by Peter Knapp. You can order them up on my website:"
bodilypress.bandcamp.com/merch
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The Margins Weep Slow Roses
These are poems exploring the lyric-narrative from the margins through the lens of grief, loss, friendship, addiction, mental illness, advocacy, & recovery, dedicated to the memory of the late trumpeter and composer Daniel Levine.
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Narratives of the Strata
These poems are influenced by George Oppen, Tomas Tranströmer, Bei Dao, & William Carlos Williams, among others: imagistic lyric-narratives exploring the different layers, or “strata” of consciousness & reality, in my own time & place, throughout what feels like many lives here already, on Earth.
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Caprice
These are poems responding to war. I’ve written before about the Western world’s willful blindness on the part of disasters occurring outside the supposed frame. These poems grapple with notions of spirit & collapse, & are dedicated to Pierre Joris & Jerome Rothenberg, two poets who have been gracious to me in their support & generous in their work both as translators, & as poets & cultural critics themselves.
Below:
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Chapbook #4...
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Take 1
Artwork: Calm's Chaos - Storm Eye
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April 2025
Eliot Cardinaux @eliotcardinaux has two new books coming out, and my color woodcut image “Forest For The Trees” is on the cover of one of them! The book is titled “Wandering Subject”.
It’s an honor and privilege to collaborate with this talented poet, pianist, and composer! Keep an eye out for announcements on Instagram:
September 2025
A new collaboration with Eliot Cardinaux:
In his words “The cover, by Peter Knapp, of my forthcoming collection, ‘ A Species of This Invaded World ’.”
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“Sweet Peas”, 2021, Woodcut, Edition of 10, 28"h x 20"w (71.1 x 50.8 cm).
All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2021 Peter Knapp
From Eliot Cardinaux's Facebook Post September 9, 2025:
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Today is pub day for my new collection, A SPECIES OF THIS INVADED WORLD. Head to www.bodilypress.com (link in bio/comments) to purchase.
“There’s a doubled long-poem (think Nate Mackey’s Mu/Song of the Andoumboulou) sounding its way out over the flood plains of the Connecticut River outside Northampton MA. Over a series of volumes published in 2024-5, Eliot Cardinaux (who has one foot in jazz piano and the other kicking pine needles on a trail in Shutesbury) has been developing a numbered sequence of 3-4 stanza open form poems (often dedicated) alongside their Mile Marker suite. A Species of this Invaded World gives us XXVI-L of the first, and miles 72-100 of the second. Mile markers along the highway mark a trip you are always in the midst of, whether you are on foot or in a car. Breaths in and out. Quiet, clear brush-stroke perfect songs (in couplet or 2-3 word lines). The world that is not adequate we have to get through. The work of the walk set to a lyric and its two-step of gratitude, unresolved difficulty, and praise. The numbered suite brings in the larger world of influence and reading — Paul Celan, Michael Palmer, poets or artists Eliot knows or needs to sing to, their lover Shana. Seeing “the sadness already there” alongside “Michael Palmer / putting pressure on memory to remind itself / of air / from the underground springs / beneath / Walter Benjamin’s Berlin.” The “Small place, there, for / memory finding one- / self on stage, in shock,” that is also “rainwater’s reverb / a distant / siren / cars rushing by / quotidian / the wind.” Poems that “Reach out / to power with a / spell, the tendrils of / which are your eyes.” Big music over Emily’s grave.”
—David Need, author of Sweetbitter & Broken Windows
“The poems in this book are suffused with urgency and necessity in existential meaning-making. These poems break the barriers between reason and unreason. This poet is an unconventional (stylistically, thematically) explorer of consciousness, friendship, landscape, the miraculous. Eliot Cardinaux’s voices in A Species of This Invaded World are unjaded, questioning, vital. We are warned: “but don't be so sure / how I feel / or what / I think of you.” Be ready to be awed.”
—Uche Nduka, author of Bainbridge Island Notebook & To Umber
Cover woodcut by the ever-astounding Peter Knapp