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Vision, Music, and the Scepter: Ben Mazer’s 'The Glass Piano'
Ben Mazer may best be considered a poet for poets; his work a fortress against the common reader.
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Humanizing an “Enigma”: A New Book Illuminates Martín Ramírez’s Life and Art
What is known with certainty about an artist’s life story can undoubtedly shed the light of understanding on his or her achievements and legacy. But what happens when authoritative historical documents, personal letters, photos, diaries and other materials have not been consulted or are scarce or ev
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Coldness, Concept, & Convention: On Aaron Kunin’s 'Cold Genius'
One current, and especially heated, debate animating the contemporary poetry scene revolves around conceptual poetry’s polemic against Romantic expressivity.
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Surround Sound: The Sonic Environments of Jacob Kirkegaard's ‘Earside Out’
This past spring, the Danish Museet for Samtids Kunst acknowledged the hard-won singularity of countryman Jacob Kirkegaard by granting him his first solo exhibition, Earside Out.
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Two New Comics Memoirs Recount Tales of Coming Out and Life in Brooklyn
In Long Red Hair, Meags Fitzgerald examines conversations that helped shape at how she looks at herself, as well as the difficult road to her coming out as queer. Dean Haspiel's Beef with Tomato looks at his life as an artist and, in his words, a voyeur peering into the lives of other people on his
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A Photographic Index of Illicit Objects Seized at the US Border
On the cover of Taryn Simon's Contraband is the corpse of a bird of prey, its body contorted over a nondescript envelope that was marked "home décor" and on its way from Indonesia to Miami, Florida, when it was seized at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.
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An Autobiography in Notes and Edits
Poet, pianist, and visual artist Anne-Marie Levine’s collected memoir, Reculer Pour Mieux Sauter: The Complete Works Volumes 1–12 (Project Projects), takes the form of a collaged scrapbook.
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Digressive Essays Imagine the Inner Worlds of Paintings
When I was a child, I made obsessive drawings of schoolgirls and created elaborate personal histories for each of my characters. Imbuing my silent drawings with stories was a form of entertainment, and is, for me at least, one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing about visual art.
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A Superior Notebook: Richard Hell’s ‘Massive Pissed Love’
When Richard Hell’s I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp was published two years ago, it got a lot of favorable notice, but I never really thought the book — an account of the writer’s life up to about 1984 — was properly understood.
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The Radiance of the French Renaissance in Miniature
While the grandest glories of the French Renaissance were the elaborate castles circling Paris and adorning the Loire Valley, down in Central France a much smaller art form flourished.
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The Melancholy Art of Japanese Floral Arrangements
Ikebana, which translates to "living flowers," is the Japanese art of floral arrangement that dates back to the 16th century.
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Hopscotching Through Patti Smith’s Mind
Smith’s new memoir “records time backwards and forwards” as she skips from moment to moment across the past forty years of her life.