By Greg Bem
I was flattened by disaster but upheld by the belief of my community.
From “Rising from the Ashes,” the preface by Felicia Rice (pg. xvii)
The Heavy Lifting Companion is a book of our climate. It is a book of our ecology. It is a book of disasters. It is a book that answers the question: what is next when what was is lost? This remarkable book is a companion to an art book that was born out of the loss of a physical printing press following a wildfire. It addresses what was, what can be, and what is across multiple frames, and does so by combining truth through storytelling with truth through the exploration of poetry. And it is done so riding on the tails of immense work and passion: the work of the individual and work of the community.
This brief review starts with a disclaimer: much of the joy of exploring the resilience and evolution of Moving Parts Press and Felicia Rice’s commitment to her craft is discovered through The Heavy Lifting Companion. To explicitly describe the beginning, middle, and end of this chapter would be to do a disservice to the companion work itself, a companion that serves, as companions do in everyday life, to provide support, assistance, and a conduit of knowing experiences, truths, and reflections.
I could live
in this house
house of
memory
even though
nobody I ever
knew or was
kin to had
such a memory.
From “House of Water, House of Feathers, House of Light” by Theresa Whitehill (pg. 24)
In August 2020, at the heart of much attention in the world, “a devastating megafire destroyed almost 1,000 structures in the Santa Cruz Mountains” (pg. xiv) including Rice’s home and letterpress shop and inventory of artists’ books. The loss seemingly insurmountable, Rice’s perseverance reflects a richer story: there is more than this, more than that, more than loss, more than gain: it is totality, a Zen encompassing. The Heavy Lifting Companion is that which sprouts up from the devastation and reveals this spectrum of experience, survival, emergence.
How do we describe our resilience, our growth, our timeline? How do we describe destruction, loss, and grief? Forays into the fluidity of the adverse vary widely. Honoring the poetic and the exploratory, this book is both compact and utterly descriptive: it shines light on facts and nuances, and centers comradery and conversation. The Heavy Lifting Companion is an incredible introduction to Rice’s press for newcomers, and an incredible and visceral exploration of this harrowing sequence.
This book is a book about a press, but it is also a book about a book: of which it takes its name, Heavy Lifting, a limited-edition art book that was born not only out of ash but out of the crumbling and defiantly awful series of events around 2020: COVID, policy brutality and murder, disorder, disease, collapse.
The reader rides out the waves of crises. In the end, the book gives the reader the power of flight, perspective, community, and the will to persevere.
From “A Different Reading, a New Art,” the foreword by Inge Bruggeman (pg. x)
The Heavy Lifting Companion is a structure, a form through which we meet expression. It is organized and orderly. It responds to chaos and exhaustion. It is emblematic of work. The book is divided into several key sections. It describes intention. The building. The expanding. Pushing forward. It describes the facts. The flames. The fires. It describes the reasons and the movements. It pushes through into the abstract, poetry, the conversations, the friendships. And it moves into transformative, formalization: the project, the community, the collectivism.
It is a book of multiple voices, both within and without. The shared action to restore the lost press, the collaborations between Rice and Whitehill, whose work dances around event and circumstance but finds something new, a landing pad or a home, between the roar of change. From press to artist book to the keystone companion, friendship is the motif peeking out from between the pages. And it pushes forward to the greater whole. The final sections of the book include an exquisite remixing and adapting, an evolved form, a film, which takes the text and reimagines it. While the film is not included in or throughout the book, we are afforded glimpse into its construction is provided, and we are given an enticing opportunity to reflect on future actions.
It’s painful to think that such important work is coming into the world at this moment when it is so hard for the work to be seen as it should be seen, but there is also the new way in which such work will be seen because of the upended paradigms and the emerging changes. It’s a moment of free-fall.
By Theresa Whitehill in “Genesis: Felicia Rice and Theresa Whitehill / —A selection from emails exchanged between June 2020 & July 2021”
A sense of frailty and risk. A sense of alluring. A sense of invitation: invitation to experience challenge and challenge met with response. Reading The Heavy Lifting Companion offers the experience of responsibility. To support that which suffers. To prevent that which is on the brink. To douse that which burns. Rice and Whitehill provide a call to know this, to walk with it, to understand it. Their explorations are beautiful despite the harrowing conditions.
You can find the book here: https://movingpartspress.com/product/the-heavy-lifting-companion/
Greg Bem is a poet and librarian living on the sacred and unceded land of the Spokane Tribe: South Hill, Spokane, Washington. He writes book reviews for Rain Taxi, Exacting Clam, The International Examiner, and more. He is a proud union supporter and finds many of his hours stretched across mountains and water bodies. Learn more at gregbem.com.
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North of Oxford 