Strike is a collaboration between the American Organik art group and German artist/screenprinting and publishing duo Christian Gfeller and Anna Helsgård, working as ReSurgo. The book has been shipped around the world from Berlin to Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Madison, and back to Brooklyn in the over ten-year-long production process. ReSurgo screenprinted the book’s pages for the first layer of page activation using dozens of screens and hundreds of passes on the book’s pages, building dense fields of collaged abstractions and geometrical landscapes populated by a recurring menagerie of characters whose antics convey the multiple narratives of the poetry used to cohere the books radical sequencing. The Organik crew then integrated numerous media into the book’s pagescapes, using ink jet printers, ink, turmeric pigments, and wax rubbing from numerous matrices all over the United States to build an even denser palimpsest. Then text rubbings from bronze plaques from the New York City Public Library’s Library Walk were carefully rubbed into the book featuring poem fragments from Gu Cheng, Lucille Clifton, Willa Catha, and Virginia Wolfe. Finally a layer of wet media was applied to further cohere the page flow.

The book is a tour de force of collaborative exploration and ultimately a homage to the enduring strength and inspiration of the work of the four poets whose work is featured in the book. While combining numerous printing techniques the book is, perhaps, best described as a painting in codex form; as well as a visual interpretation of the poetry that uses both random and structured creative strategies to build both imaginative and narrative resonance between the poems and the illustrations.