Cross-disciplinary chapbook created in collaboration with photographer Robert Revere. The book addresses the act of looking, and the experience of going to museums. It is also about the COVID pandemic, and a time when museums and cultural spaces were closed. Forthcoming November 15, 2023.
Advance Praise
“The writing and images in this many-layered book make me see my world in new ways. They bring together the most personal and the abstract, interacting and making me more and more curious as I turn each page, excited to discover what will come next. What new relationship will unfold between word and image, between self and other, between what is seen and what is perceived? This treasure of a book speaks on many levels about why and how art matters, what beauty is, and where we find it. Each time I reread it, I find something new. This is a book to be savored.”
—Vaughn Sills, photographer of Places for the Spirit, Traditional African American Gardens, and One Family
“‘The lines, the sweet curves. The way light hits the surface of a face’ observes the speaker, referencing her long-standing love affair with the art of sculpture (—all the while playing the instrument of assonant rhyme). But as this gorgeous marriage of text (prose poem) and image (photographs) is revealed, one senses that something else is in play. Yes, these pieces ‘tremble, they vibrate—’ But why? Because although the backdrop of this dual artistic journey is a global pandemic, one can’t (I couldn’t) escape that what is unfolding before our eyes and ears is a portrait of an artist (falling) in love: ‘[T]he way, when you smile, you always lift your chin, as if pleasure starts at the neck and travels upward to the mouth. Upward to your eyes.’ But what also felt true is that these photographic images were very deliberately placed, often offering this viewer an example of the visual experience depicted in the preceding text. As if, in the face of our mortalities, art and the possibility of love is what kept us going: ‘This is how we map our loss. All those beautiful curves.’”
—Francisco Aragón, author of After Rubén and Glow of Our Sweat
By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of Our Nation’s Capital