Saint Julian Press

Britt Posmer ~ Poet ~ Artist

Britt Posmer is a poet, visual artist, and dancer who began spontaneous image-making and writing during a period of critical illness and spiritual awakening. Her work depicts a consciousness and holistic vision that has flowered from a commitment to creative process as both devotional self- emptying and a unique expression of somatic mysticism. Originally trained as a classical ballerina, she spent nearly two decades performing and touring with various companies based in Chicago, IL, including Ballet Chicago, Ballet Theatre of Chicago/Lexington Ballet, and Chicago Ballet.

Shortly before her illness in 2009, Britt received a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which she attended with a focus in Performance and Visual and Critical Studies. Her last piece, “there is a way in which the body sleeps,” created in collaboration with performance artists Lisa Abbatamarco and Joshua Kent, was presented as part of a collection of dance works curated by Ayako Kato at Epiphany Episcopal Church in Chicago in August 2009.

Britt was raised in the Episcopal Church, and the unitive stream at the heart of Christianity still holds a special place in her spiritual life. She is an avid student of the continuous revelation at the root of all the great wisdom traditions and has a particular passion for the reintegration of the Feminine within the language and experience of Awakening.

"Britt Posmer has obviously crossed the threshold into the state of non abiding. In a clear, liberated and liberating, unconventional voice, she gives us “the raw seduction of real love.” She has traversed the underbelly of life and knows the dense and dark caverns of the human condition. Like every true shaman, she has returned to share her discoveries. Britt pulls words like arrows from an invisible quiver, while pirouetting beneath a moonless sky. Yes, a luminous quiver hewn during hours and hours-becoming-years of internal exploration. Britt is Artemis, the “huntress pregnant with god,” who expresses the direct approach interwoven with unapologetic, Deep feminine, primordial wisdom!"

~ Rashani Réa, artist, activist, intimist; author of Beyond Brokenness, Shimmering Birthless and Moonlight on a Night Moth's Wing.

"The poet in crisis (our crisis) can, like Basho and the Zen masters, remove the subject, the "I," from the naked suchness of the dusty crumb. Then the poem is a verbal still-life, capturing a single moment unoccupied by the human self: the essence of Haiku. Or the poet can retain the "I" and fill it with tears, with the pangs of all her unborn children, with every stifled uncertain abused and human voice, even the voice of the homeless angel.

Britt Posmer has chosen to retain the "I," but an empty "i" (we must think of Keat's "negative capability") who takes into its vacuous orb the bodies of hurt children, fallen stars, muted women, mothers, half burnt seeds, mouths bursting in silent zeros of pain. She finds a single voice for the animal and angel in us, giving her poems the irony of wholeness, the grief that germinates eternal beauty. "

~Alfred K. LaMotte, whose books include Wounded Bud: Poems for Meditation and Shimmering Birthless: a Confluence of Verse and Image (with Rashani Réa).

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