Krista Franklin: Under the Knife

Part memoir, part treatise, part collage and experiment, Krista Franklin’s Under the Knife is an excavation; a dig at the sites of the construction and demolition of the poet/artist’s selves. Franklin plays fast and loose with fact at the crossroads of the history of her maternal line and her own in a ruptured conversation about inheritance and the generational traumas that blossom in the body. Under the Knife hiccups, cross-fades and stops midsentence as Franklin cuts through the illusion of memory, the pathologies of history, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Krista Franklin is a writer and visual artist whose work has appeared in Poetry, The Offing, Black Camera, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, BOMB Magazine, and Encyclopedia, Vol. F-K and L-Z, among others. She is a frequent collaborator with fellow artists, most notably contributing her writing to performances, prints, audio recordings and film voiceovers for the projects of Cauleen Smith; the text of Ayanah Moor’s hand-