Index of Self-Study
Since 2005
2025—Let down the veil. Be. Felt. Body first &
2025—Memory:
2025—to live in beauty, in ease, in pleasure, “to live
2025—Curious things are happening & I want more.
2025—body. A living spell, alchemy. Blood
2025—Theology    Art home    Italy
2025—“Half Awake And Half Asleep In The Water.”
2025—Matrilineal (her 70th birthday)
2025—Salt crests. My belly sunburned, browned.
2025—Loft as erotic-temple + studio. salon?
2025—poetry. A time of great contradiction…)
2025—Poetry, god damn it !!!
2025—Love and solitude
2025—perhaps the actual story? “The writer”
2025—name, Amanda, because he’d always loved
2025—but to a female first person who is all writing…”
2025—04/21 Butterflies & birds & blooms
2025—where she dreamed of living…) ((birthday
2025—fleeting, a blip, one quick turn (time?) ((opening
2025—the same scars and quirks & with my arms full
2024—“This vocational opera will have many acts.”
2024—Persephone days
2024—Blood in my thong. Dry skin. Dry lips.
2024—Election day (decay)
2024—the summer night is pregnant, floral, swarming
2024—now, a year later, taking my first breath since
2023—07/01/23 4:30 or so AM,
2023—wisdom pre-consciousness. the destinies
2023—that rich Ra sunburned husk
2023—(Body monologue) Fictions?
2023—together we are reading this final chapter
2023—divinity that haunts me still, “Flaming  June”
2023—and which now feels wonderfully meaningless.
2023—my hotel bed smelled of our sex, like
2023—Lingerie? To walk those streets. The Strand
2023—paint under my nails, the smell of full moon
2022—LA FEELINGS,
2022—What is your devotion? (heatwave)
2022—private ritualistic performances for one
2022—Everything right now is a cosmic hall of mirrors
2022—This is the lover: seducing without seducing,
2022—divine voice, wild winds, energetics of
2022—my namesake: “beloved”
2022—content, watching the world go by.
2022—Bright red lips, backwards cap
2022—mint green walls and angel wings
2022—Before and after rehearsal, nothing in focus.
2022—Walking the streets of Paris. Saturday
2022—Dinner party #3. Looking for a white piano
2022—Chronology & not. Narrative & not.
2022—in Paris. Arousing, erotic, then nightmares.
2022—The Artist. Everything right now: The Artist
2022—point & shoot, Paris list
2022—choosing Carmine + Citrona, flower installation
2022—Meghan: “my third eye is dizzy”
2022—Goodbye hardest holiest year of my life
2022—beasts INCANTATIONS in praise of
2022—perish, you have to believe me; things
2022—energy vividly released from form
2022—02-02-2022: (too much death lately.
2022—“virginity”, rituals, archetypes
2022—on my knees with our fire ringing in my ears
2022—Different hims and also all the same. Different
2021—deities. Dirt and smoke and cinder.
2021—3:21pm, Friday. Here I am back in LA
2021—Is this the grief talking?
2021—running, afraid to feel it. miles off course.
2021—art, & that will be my liberation as a woman
2021—how did I ever grow all this long hair?
2021—“unfathomable emotions”
2021—my psyche as if swinging between extremes
2021—photographic field notes; bad motel coffee
2021—Something more complex than loneliness
2021—The astrologers and the reborn queen
2021—lush life, Oros Street
2021—My mother’s mother, a Scorpio, a woman
2021—The question of an erotic life
2021—known it was the last. “The last.” Of what?
2021—All slouching leisure in the broad daylight
2021—Ghost-speak through the dreamwaves.
2021—“woman/goddess/sea” (p.33)
2021—Ali Smith: there’s always an untold story
2020—mirage photos, natal conjunction
2020—“That is all, (all?!) I want—reënchantment.”
2020—hungry slut seductress fuckable doll goddess
2020—2am kissing until my lips were bruised
2020—night shunga, moonstoned twice
2020—both the mystical and the demonic
2020—v2 12:48pm, 06-16-2020
2020—snakeskin visions, symbols, dreams?
2020—(isolation); excerpts
2020—SUB-TEXT. 7 home    feeling into my desires
2020—coffee so as to be up all night relishing
2020—patina, Song of India, 3 33, orchid, the cat
2020—tantric currents / pink
2019—This old costume, outworn.
2019—she is never purely alone, but playing the part
2019—time? disrespecting the magic of
2019—07/03/19: the canopy of redwoods
2019—What I’m left with:
2019—And tell me, what will you give me in return?
2019—How to melt. I tried
2019—& sublime relief, simultaneously, concurrently
2019—extravagant the desire, dark and moonless
2019—Notes on Failure.
2019—How many How many How many How many
2019—What context is needed?
2019—Animal whispers, subtle cues. Delicate.
2018—A dream about him, and early.
2018—Venus in fur/Virgo in fur
2018—(Before the accident)
2018—Pg. 33: “the sweat of the absolute...”
2018—Cherries, peaches. Four bottles of wine
2018—Theater of Love, kiss #2
2018—Theater of Love, kiss #1
2018—I am always in performance.
2018—Technique—refined so as to be abandoned
2018—the paired-off women I know
2018—Rumors playing windows down
2018—Party dresses & real reasons to wear them
2018—First day of spring, drinking honeysuckle
2018—If love wants me, let it find me (Wednesday,
2018—Men-as-muse
2018—6:20, 6:30, 6:40, and still meditating, still
2018—Jesus year (velvet boots)
2018—sweat & heat & saliva & semen & blood &
2018—12th house. Venus-Mars conjunct. Fire
2018—Sunset Blvd, smelling of tuberose
2017—Anne Carson: “Discover all that is ‘feminine’
2017—The last morning.
2017—Love hungry on your lips
2017—Thanksgiving morning
2017—mysticism, Saint Teresa
2017—The heat broke last night in a clear instant
2017—Anaïs’s intensely feminine, trickster “I”
2017—Manifestoes of Surrealism, Nadja
2017—Pink moon lunar cycle
2017—smell of laundry and the smell of rain
2017—An entire ocean pounding at the door of
2017—Sutra #5 (Vibrate the cosmos. The cosmos
2017—Los Angeles, Act II
2017—Nine months and $9,000.
2016—Interlude
2016—my desire for love, the shape I seek love to
2016—What’s real? What stays? What do I erase?
2016—Today I am full of witchy splendor
2015—In the elevator? At the bar? (karma)
2015—Meditations in twin rhythm to my day
2015—I will consider it an ongoing work of art.
2015—I will protect it as my own.
2015—my life into a new center
2015—BLOOD MESSAGES
2015—There we all danced barefoot to the piano
2015—But also: freedom, strangeness, beauty,
2015—beginning (sob swollen, culmination)
2015—bad spirits. The sun feels like
2015—Untitled Love Story. Writing. Flying.
2014—Matrilineal (Christmas Eve)
2014—What am I rushing towards, I thought?
2014—Like a charged field, waiting for the lightning
2014—Erotic degradation
2014—It was available, the sex, available, alive,
2014—“Desire is easy. And everywhere.”
2014—August. Puissance.
2014—words. Where have I been?
2014—Self stuck, prefigured, and haunted walls.
2014—“Faux travel novel”
2014—Light leaks Breathing room Poetry Paint
2014—Dream poet for hire
2014—as we retell our own mythologies. LOVE!!
2014—Writing this to future you, future me
2014—Her pioneer home, a terrible flu (29th)
2014—Anne Truitt: “the only rule, to let the artist
2013—Silence. He asks:
2013—The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
2013—“supposed” to be. Residency week.
2012—Suddenly, unexpectedly, alone. Relief?
2012—I wanted disorder;
2012—a small town in a big expanse of prairie.
2012—the stillness of my center a straight line into
2012—Create. (Repeat.))
2012—right, we
2012—the splits & chasms still to come
2011—False prophecy. The residency week.
2011—Throw the Emptiness out of Your Arms: Rilke’s
2011—Self portrait with his self portrait
2011—Madrid & Montserrat, spells
2011—instincts for Spain, instincts towards
2010—The Glass Man, days of rain
2010—holding two bottles of cheap champagne
2009—private self/public self
2009—These days? They’re work and writing and
2009—Tennessee Williams, from his notebooks
2009—Last night, Halloween. Will:
2009—The Tower (XVI)
2009—drunk, high. Brunch. Groceries. Sunday?
2009—I felt dizzy. Thought of my sister. Missed
2009—reading Ginsberg, reading Paglia, reading
2009—It’s full summer: hot sweaty sticky so bright
2009—What I learned in LA (rough)
2009—It was sunny and every restaurant was full
2009—Love, he said, love, my love.
2008—The last of the parties.
2008—Not sure who I am in this
2008—“Beginning.” What?
2008—06/01/2008: Everything happened so fast.
2008—Erotic-Romantic-Platonic-Fraternal
2008—Adulthood is rotten. And young adulthood
2007—Desire in reverse.
2007—A few days before our graduation.
2007—I am twenty-two, newly heartbroken, newly
2006—Purple bedroom walls & a mantle & too
2006—sex to have and men to love and words to
2006—But it can’t be now.
2006—12:38am, something has snapped
2006—Dressing, undressing, redressing, costuming
2005—Theater of Love, previsualization
2005—in his bedroom in Brooklyn, Bitches Brew.
2005—the Queen of Wands.
2005—Valentine Rd.
© Amanda Shank (“poetic self-archiving”)— ‘25