Site Specific Poetry Sculpture
Ruigoord Poetry Festival, May 2021
Organum is a site-specific poetry sculpture installed during the Ruigoord Poetry Festival in the legendary artist village of Ruigoord, the Netherlands. Created on a wooden panel, the piece features a sculptural shape of lips—symbol of utterance, invocation, and feminine transmission. Woven into the lips is a thread-text adaptation of my full moon poem Minerva’s Thunder Lip, a work that channels lunar wisdom through the voice of the goddess of strategy, sovereignty, and creative intelligence. Read the original poem here on CREATRIX Magazine.
The panel was placed in the Poetry Garden curated by Dutch poet Hans Plomp, and Dutch artist Aja Waalwijk becoming part of Ruigoord’s living archive of poetic interventions. As of August 2024, the sculpture remains on site, continuing to whisper lunar echoes to all who pass.
Organum and the Voice of the Land
In Organum, I embedded poetry in the land itself, inviting viewers to encounter language not just as a symbol but as organ - a sounding structure within a living system where poetry becomes a tuning fork between human intention and nature’s rewilding force.
Birds of Equinox (2019)
Poetry Collection, published by Red Temple Press, imprint of CREATRIX Magazine
Cover Art: “Artemis” by Carrie Ann Baade
Birds of Equinox is a poetic invocation of cyclical time, feminine awakening, and cosmic memory. Blending myth, ritual, and star imagery, Jana Astanov channels voices of the divine feminine through elemental landscapes and lunar thresholds. Written in parallel with the Red Temple collective's ritual practices, the collection weaves personal transformation with planetary rhythms—marking the equinox as a gateway between light and shadow, self and cosmos.
Sublunar (2017)
Poetry Collection
Sublunar is a lyrical journey through the emotional and elemental landscapes. In this collection, Jana Astanov explores love, loss, desire, and spiritual longing under the influence of the Moon - the celestial body that governs tides, moods, and the cycles of womanhood. Bridging the mystical and the philosophical, Sublunar weaves ritual, memory, and invocation into a poetic exploration of what it means to be human beneath the ever-shifting sky.
Red Temple: The Light of Her New Consciousness
NYC Poetry Festival, Governors Island – July 2016
The Light of Her New Consciousness is a continuation of my earlier performance and sound installation Inside Her Head (2015). This iteration deepens the exploration of feminine consciousness through poetry, sound, sculpture, and participatory ritual.
At its center stands a site-specific sculpture—a large tent-like installation housing a divinatory game composed of cut-ups from my own poetry books interwoven with fragments from other writers. These texts are drawn from a powerful lineage of female poets, including Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Marianne Moore, Anna Akhmatova, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Maya Angelou, Adrienne Rich, Emily Dickinson, Wislawa Szymborska, Anne Sexton, and many more.
Visitors are invited to engage in the ritual of Star Poetry—selecting four lines at random and contributing a fifth of their own, forming a five-pointed poetic star. These offerings are added to the installation, transforming the fabric of the structure into a flowing, celestial sky of collective verse.
Through this multilayered work, I seek to reassert the feminine as an essential and equal force in the human experience—a voice of intuition, complexity, sensuality, and visionary power. The Light of Her New Consciousness is both an invocation and an offering: a ritual space for reclaiming the feminine divine through shared creation.
Poetry Hopscotch, PHv1.0, 2015, new media
Poetry Hopscotch, PHv1.0, is a new media application that explores the literary cut up technique through the use of digital technology. Created by Jana Astanov and new media artists Rolf van Gelder with an aim to establish poetry as exploratory landscape for new media art.
CONCEPT: From the structure of poetic verse to the linguistic chaos from which new forms emerge, creating a digital repository of an immersive poetry co-creation process, by means of random appropriation as well as original content uploaded in real time by the users via their mobile devices.
The concept of the cut-up technique can be traced to Dadaists, it was then popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by such writers as Burroughs, Gysin, Burns and Cortazar (1963 "Hopscotch").
The Way the Poets Fuck
A Mini Sound Poetry Collection by Jana Astanov & ASMP (Alternative Stream Media Project: Cezhan Ambrose, Argel Liritime, and Yannah Paradise)
Listen on SoundCloud →
The Way the Poets Fuck is a raw, one-take sound poetry session born from an impromptu hangout in 2014 - a few poems, and three artists in intuitive sync. Recorded under the banner of Alternative Stream Media Project (ASMP), the collection features Cezhan Ambrose, Argel Liritime, and Yannah Paradise (Jana Astanov) channeling a shared frequency of poetic expression, sound improvisation, and atmospheric resonance.
Yannah brought in poems originally written in 2014, some reworked from an unreleased album project called Ethereal. Most of the texts came from The Contemporary Landscape of Ecofeminism, including “Frequency,” “Earth Profile,” and “Mias,” alongside the title track, “The Way the Poets Fuck,” inspired by her Antidivine installation series. What unfolded was an intimate, improvised fusion of spoken word, ambient sound, and intuitive presence.
Argel tuned into Yannah’s voice, responding in real time as she read softly, while Cezhan played, captured, and later mixed the layered audio textures. The result: three tracks, each around ten minutes long—sonic poems that drift between the sensual and the cosmic, the grounded and the mystical.
This project is not just a recording—it's a moment captured, a convergence of energies, a spontaneous ritual. It marks the quiet birth of something ethereal, ephemeral, and yet lasting in vibration.
Rooted in Jana’s interdisciplinary practice bridging poetry, performance, and sound, The Way the Poets Fuck continues her exploration of the sacred, the subversive, and the erotic as portals to expanded states of consciousness.
Antidivine
Poetry Collection by Jana Astanov
Published by Undergroundbooks.org, 2016
Antidivine is a collection of 48 poems that merge the mystical, the erotic, and the political into an unflinching poetic invocation. Drawing from three major series—Free Dreaming, Northern Grimoire, and the titular Antidivine—the book traverses dream states, cosmic visions, and embodied protest. While the second series (Northern Grimoire) has been fully absorbed into Antidivine, the whole functions as a single, expansive ecosystem of voice and vision.
These poems resist containment. They spill into performance, sound, sculpture, and ritual. They speak in tongues—channeling ecofeminism, mythology, and inner alchemy—while confronting the systemic forces that suppress intuitive, feminine, and earth-based knowledge. The “antidivine” here is not a rejection of the sacred, but a rejection of divinity as hierarchy, domination, and disembodiment.
Antidivine rewrites the body into myth and the myth into method. It is a grimoire of the unruly self, the haunted world, and the visionary flame that survives both.
