Madeleine Barnes is a writer and visual artist from Pittsburgh, PA living in Brooklyn. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women-identified and non-binary writers and artists. She is the recipient of a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship, two Academy of American Poets prizes, and the Princeton Poetry Prize, and her artwork has appeared on the covers of literary journals like Washington Square Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, and Cimarron Review. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University in 2016, and her second chapbook, Light Experiments, is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2018. cordella.org | madeleinebarnes.com

“Due to man’s sinful nature it is dangerous to have open, direct communication with angels.” —Emanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia (Heavenly Mysteries or Secrets of Heaven)

Heavenly Bodies aims to conjure serene, sacred, etheric spaces via digital alteration and layering in search of ghostly or angelic presences. The artist Lowry Burgess once casually told me that he has guardian angels that are about 30 feet tall, and I’ve been thinking about that for years. I love the idea of having benevolent, semi-divine celestial beings looking out for humanity, and in my recent work I search for them in unusual places—rising out of the ocean, submerged in a lily pond, or in the dizzying ceiling of Grand Central. I think we all have positive forces watching over us—but they don’t look like we’d expect them to. I also think my friend Henry was right when he said, “your camera is haunted.”