Judith Henry

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Artist’s Statement

During my art career I have used various multi-media techniques to both explore and hide identity. I examine the friction between the interior life and public self. To stress anonymity, I have often used masks in my work. In this issue of Posit I am showing work from two series done recently. Beauty Masks is a book consisting of self-portraits made by covering my face with “found” faces. There are 120 self-portraits in this book. I juxtapose images of model’s faces ripped from fashion magazines over my own face as a mask. The images I have chosen to disguise myself are diverse in their race, hairdo, accessories and dress. There’s a stark contrast between the retouched and made-up faces and my actual hands and body — a reminder of the commodification of idealized beauty and a reflection of the fear of death. The second series, Casting Call, is a collection of almost 300 miniature sculptures made of detritus found in my studio, on the streets and in my kitchen. I utilized adhesive tape, push pins, paint tubes, sponges, cotton balls, swabs, nails, clips, screws, anything and everything I was able to glean. These recombinant icons emerged as an installation at BravinLee Projects in 2018.They extend my exploration of personal identify by creating humanoid surrogate identities that stand in for my hidden persona(s). The diversity of forms reflect the huge disparity found in any crowd. Having pursued a detached, perhaps secretive, or voyeuristic observation of people throughout my career, I believe that my work has evolved into a unique and revelatory depiction of human nature in all its diversion and mass commonality.
Judith Henry is a multi-media artist, born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. After receiving a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, she moved to New York and started making art that explored the misalignments between cultural representation and inner psychology. She utilizes drawing, photography, typography, video, painting, sculpture, and bookmaking. Henry has shown her art in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Cleveland, Philadelphia and internationally in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, London and Switzerland. Her most recent solo shows were at BravinLee programs, New York, 2015 and 2018, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2016 and The National Arts Club, New York, 2017.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 28)

 

It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to this 28th issue of Posit.

In these times, when discouragement threatens to become permanent and loss is increasingly entrenched, the works in this issue offer views of unexpected benefits and under-appreciated treasures – the silver linings of hardship, the x-factors of deprivation, the collateral benefits of constraint. In these pages you will find literature and art that makes grace from the found, the fallen, and the discarded; harmony from entropy; and humor from sorrow.

It is not only the visual artists featured here — Joan Tanner, Robin Croft, Judith Henry, and Sarah Sloat — who penetrate and re-imagine the undervalued, ignored, and overlooked. Michael J. Henry imagines humor as well as pathos in the interior life of a gun; Ian U Lockaby harnesses the energy of linguistic combination to spark unexpected connections; and Rose Auslander, Lizzy Golda, Bryan D. Price, Rebecca Pyle, Nathaniel Rosenthalis, and Marvin Shackelford synthesize value from loss and insight from despair.

We hope and trust that all of these remarkable works will revive your sense of wonder and even hope, as they have ours.

Kirstin Allio’s poems are marvels of compression and prosodic control whose wry and penetrating preoccupations wrestle with the challenge of adaptation to our digitized, mediated lives (Adaptation II, III, and IV); the bargain we must make with death (Demeter, Wild); and our problematic compulsion and capacity for invention (Icarus). In a time when we may “miss the taste / and touch of things” and recall that “Every / one was a Special // character back in the day,” the author warns us that “Enlightenment / Thinking” may yield too much “of the wrong magic” — “a bright bland / Reason a stagnant / Season an anti-love.” To embrace the alternative, these poems suggest, requires humility and courage: an endurance of pain that amounts to “being / One with pain;” an acceptance of “the drug of not knowing / why the grassy bank across the hard / working river remains wild.”

In Rose Auslander’s beautiful and haunting poems, despair is a demon that takes on various vicious yet beguiling masks to torment us, despite our defiance: “It better keep its hands / to itself, better not / slit your wrists & / say you did.” But the demon doesn’t allow a moment of contentment: “maybe I wake singing / just a note / maybe two & / it steps on my throat. / says smile.” Still, the self fights against the insidious “carrion flower says // sssh / lie still / . . . who cares / how deep it might reach up / in you.” At each new ambush, despite the menace lurking in even the loved guises of earth, water, or a breeze through the window, the self recognizes and captures it in the written word. Even as “it seasons me / in weeds & mud,” the psyche works to transform the “softened, seeping” into a beneficent essence to “become frankincense, // almost. like / forgiveness / invisible, pure.”

Robin Croft’s site-specific installations assemble found materials to explore the effects of time and place on meaning and form. Croft’s oeuvre, including his sculptures and works on paper, with their implicit and explicit references to such “greater and lesser gods” as Van Gogh, Camus, Kafka, Guston, and Duchamp, brings us face to face with the melancholic and bitterly comedic drama of mortality. Shipwreck Irene juxtaposes the locality of its materials with the incongruity of what Croft and his collaborators have so carefully constructed, grounding a ship in a forest, the vessel meticulously woven from the deadfall like an enormous basket. The same work “in decay” reveals its integration into its unlikely setting. In contrast to its challenging namesake (Duchamp’s Étant Donnés), Croft’s A taunt done, eh? creates a window onto an actual idyllic landscape without the shocking interposition of Duchamp’s spread-eagled nude. That work, like Pandemic Portal, with its vision of an arch reminiscent of a rainbow waiting at the end of our viral tunnel, seems to offer a glimmer of hope to balance the grim humor imbuing Croft’s works on paper, notwithstanding their reminder that there “ain’t nothing funny about despair.”

A life force animates Lizzy Golda’s poetry, which casts a clear gaze on life’s joyful and generative dimensions side by side with its pain, abuse, and demise. Contemplating the remains of a home, the narrator, observing that “No one likes to be / abandoned but we enjoy / escaping problems,” nonetheless identifies with the ruin, since: “when adrenaline touches / me between the eyes, / I’m riding a horse / so giddy she thrills to throw / me like winds throw rain.” (Stone House). An address to the Aztec goddess of love and beauty celebrates the fact that “All the little seeds / of every fruit and flower / are inside of us,” while The Dybbuk speaks for the haunting and haunted spirit of a “Yiddish play / full of music no one knows / in [the] dead language” of people “They thought . . . were so ugly.” These poems sing with sensitive attention to life in all of its complexity with a gifted “tongue / curled around a star.”

Judith Henry’s photography and sculpture delve beneath the surface of appearance, broadening the implications of identity by troubling the line between self and other, us and them. In Beauty Masks, the self-portrait is re-imagined and expanded as the self is multiplied yet hidden by magazine images, composing new identities from the expected and the ‘found.’ Casting Call repurposes detritus from the artist’s studio to sculpt a fanciful assortment of humanoid figures which evoke the multiplicity of identity itself. Henry’s use of juxtaposition and repurposing enact the complex relationship between the surface and the inner life; between the notion of beauty promulgated by the fashion magazines from which her images are sourced and a deeper layer of identity hidden beneath the ‘acceptable’ and expected surface – depths into which these works allow us to peer, even as they peer out at us.

In these poems by Michael J. Henry, intimate and often surprising aspects of American aggression and its existential angst are embodied in the persona of a gun. Sympathetic as Gun is — he “wants to feel good / about coining of phrase, knowing the known,” Gun is also like “us fellas, us boys” who are “all knowers . . . big talkers . . . always lecturing.” What’s more, Gun is lonely, “his body far from all other bodies,” perhaps because, even to his own dismay, his mere attention is destructive: when “Gun thought of a hockey game — / the ice rink melted and /became a tsunami.” His thoughts alone are capable of “smashing everything to smithereens.” These poems’ analogy to American meddling is as inescapable as their evocation of its pathos is perceptive: after the “teens running from the high school . . . didn’t seem to appreciate / the kind gesture” of his “kind” wave, we are reminded that Gun “curled up fetal on his creaky bed / and wept.”

There are practical truths as well as wit and wonder in Ian U Lockaby’s pieces on work on a farm where “the sides of the well collapsed, vegetable and anxiety farmed all up the sides of the water source.” In these poems, dense with linguistic energy and implication, “the meter is the motor” and “all utility must be watched.” Lockaby’s brilliant and rhythmic use of wordplay recalls Gertrude Stein’s arch linguistic play (“There’s water in the well, well, well;” “To nib with the dibble is to wear the long red gown of the weather”) even as it beautifully conjoins the language of the trade with a seasonal and poetic sensibility. We are left with the home truths of the laborer — or any of us, for that matter – but with a brilliant and elusive twist: “Shuffle your green and wilting feet. The work’s not over it’s under you. Rising up in to and through you.”

In Jonathan Minton’s evocative espistolary poems — letters, perhaps, from another civilization, or from an imagined future for us all — the addressed “you” is a powerful personage as well as a lover. There is something of the yearning of Donal Og in Minton’s repetition of the second person address: “When I stitched my mistakes into yet another monster, / you said it was fate, but you locked the tower gates. / You took my grief into a faraway kingdom, and built a room for it, / where impish creatures scratch the floors in the dark.” But the yearning is based, perhaps, on regret for a collapsing civilization as well: “The wood is dissolving around the nails and rare coins. / They are like smooth, lidless eyes staring up from their depths.” However, it may be that memory, like a lantern, is what will keep us going on: “I carry this memory like a lantern or a cup into its next sentence. / Something imaginary keeps it there, as with all ships in their harbor, / or swords that carve their plunder into smaller treasure.”

Bryan D. Price’s starkly beautiful poems speak to, and for, all of us whose lives are “held in place with safety pins,” “just / gesturing toward life and persisting.” Despite the desperation of their “cr[ies] for help” these poems remind us of “of trying to / be your beautiful actor,” urging us not to “waste the / command to go forth and reciprocate.” The harshness of Price’s assessment of his fellow “self-contained vessel[s] of putrid annoyance” also manages to encompass and enact an implicit belief in the value of observation and representation, in “render[ing] pain . . . us[ing] small words as bitten down as seeds” “until you have made sense of the brutality.”

The women in Rebecca Pyle’s mordant and witty stories live predominantly in their own imaginations, convinced, even to the literal moment of death, that “royalty really is in your head.” Yet, somehow, there is pathos in their preference for dreams and their perseverance in what they acknowledge as impossible loves, and impossible hopes. Both stories feature idealists who “could have found someone. But they didn’t want just anyone. Not yet. They were holding out for the perfect one.” Both are “almost-astronauts” hoping to dodge “the law of averages” by which “outer space . . . would kill you somehow . . . Unless you had extreme backing, extreme luck, extreme in-the-right-place at-the-right-time luck.” In Cartoon of Goodness the narrator provides a service called “Hold You Close” in which she offers her “sweetly laundered” bed as a temporary “home base, to which frightened almost-astronauts returned.” And in The Dying Plane, the protagonist is returning to the US, soon to move “to a huge numb city in America,” after a year away in “the red-velvet-dressed great sweet bed of geographical amnesia.” As she falls asleep on the plane, thoughts of the smartly dressed airline steward, Norse-named English towns, King Lear and royalty all mingle until she wakes to the knowledge of a disaster she considers “a tailored match to her despair.”

Max Ridge’s poetry is “Half mettle and half swoon” if not also “equal parts honest and bleach.” With charming archaic phraseology (“Grains green up / and the ewe doddles / probably”) and thoroughly modern insight (“That’s the shanty, and / that’s the turncoat / who made the check out / to scandal and personality”), Ridge takes account of the suspended time we are all cognizant of living right now: “the present, / where careful heroes sit waiting / for photographs to tint.” Maybe this “time vs time” we are living through has given us a clearer self-knowledge. As the persona in Hello, Caesura says wryly: “We need not be perfect. / I, for one, gave up good / in August,” although “When I love someone . . . I want to give them everything. / I give them everything in the wrong order, / or allow it all at once. That / is how I beach the thing.” “With / interpretation, inpatient warmth” these poems’ insightful and “provocative passes at the truth” can be counted on to hit their marks.

Nathaniel Rosenthalis’s “Self Portraits” address unvarnished elements of love and longing with haiku-like economy. The blunt candor of these spare poems is balanced by their aesthetic control to combine pathos with bathos and insight with humor. Plain-spoken and vividly imagistic, these poems convey the pain of abandonment and desire for attentions that are far from idealized: a kiss like “a tiny / desktop garden / of fake succulents,” or “embarrassing / underarm stains.” These poems confront the gulf between ‘seems’ and ‘is’ when even the former is far from ideal. The intimacy of their revelations is as courageous as it is funny, and their poetic craftmanship as masterful as it is modest.

It’s easy to envision Marvin Shackelford’s vivid work as film. He has an eye for the cinematographic glance that gives the viewer the complete scene. In the hospital: “The door to five was closed, locked, but someone the other side bleated like a sheep. In four a woman lay snoring loudly, a rhythm to her breath suggesting the tremulous ringtone of an older phone.” But Shackelford’s stories move swiftly from the almost surreal-real we recognize directly to the threatening deep: “And there at the entrance you shucked rainwater from your pink umbrella. The fountains of the deep threatened to swallow you.” In The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail, a brilliant characterization of a recognizable persona in our world, the “third living pope,” explores the tailoring of religion to fit a charismatic individual who “wonders aloud what the keys he’s taken hold from Saint Peter are actually supposed to start. He pictures Heaven like a cherry-red Mustang and Hell its fuel tank, launched into the backseat when it’s struck just right.” Shackelford’s secret skill is in getting the reader to see the irony in our behavior, and yet to sympathize with our frailty: “We weren’t the warrior sons and priestesses’ daughters who took this place by force and sealed it in stone. We were a disappointment,” say those left with a world destroyed by the storied ancestors in whom they “wanted to believe.”

Sarah Sloat layers cryptic aphorisms reminiscent of Franz Kafka and Jenny Holtzer along with digital graphics over archival postcards whose relationship to the overlying material is anything but straightforward. Layered almost ominously over these quaintly antiquated scenes, Sloat’s texts and graphics seem to loom over the unsuspecting innocence of a bygone era. Against our contemporary backdrop of Instagram and SnapChat, Sloat’s revival of the postcard is pointedly resonant, reminding us of the long pedigree of the bourgeois impulse to display just how far one has come from where one began. Despite the compositional grace and mysterious beauty of these assemblages, they convey a subtle unease: All is not right in Sloat’s worlds, and nothing is simple.

The title of Joan Tanner’s series, FLAW, exposes just the kinds of assumptions her art explodes. What, after all, is a flaw? How are we to look at what is imperfect, discarded, or no longer useful? Tanner’s sculptural compositions reveal the shallowness of our hierarchical and utilitarian assumptions. Her complex groupings of category-defying materials and unidentifiable forms ask us to attend to the actual in all of its unruly and unexpected grace. Tanner re-envisions the materials of utility and function –– unfinished plywood, tubular steel, nuts, bolts, netting, gear chains, plastic tubing, wires, etc. — in forms that suggest no recognizable use. Although she neither ornaments nor refines her materials to more predictably identify them as “art,” Tanner arranges the detritus of the functional in compositions that transcend it. By suggesting such purely “artistic” images as landscapes inhabited by figural groupings, clouds, and waves, or subtly biomorphic forms floating and dancing like birds or butterflies on currents of air or water, these works transform how we perceive, until what at first blush seemed harsh or chaotic becomes graceful and harmonious. Tanner brings out the hidden music in the everyday world we might otherwise ignore.

Thank you so much for visiting. Stay safe, stay well — and take care of each other!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Judith Henry

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Artist’s Statement

For almost 50 years I have created conceptual multimedia artworks exploring the friction between our interior lives and public selves. I have secretly observed, listened to, photographed, filmed and recorded strangers in public places while remaining largely invisible. When using myself as subject, I have appeared masked or hidden, as in several recent series.

After graduating Carnegie Mellon, I moved to New York from the suburbs of Cleveland and found myself in a densely populated metropolis. For me, each person was a matchless original as well as a stereotype. In 1970, with a small, cheap camera, I began surreptitiously photographing people on the streets, often listening to their conversations. In an attempt to tease out patterns of human experience, I aggregated thousands of photographs.

For years, I repurposed my street photographs in many forms: books, videos, photographs, installations and sculptures, and even created Who I Saw in New York from 1970-2000, a book and gallery installation consisting of photographs of thousands of people.

When I moved from SoHo to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2008, I became dependent on the L train to visit Manhattan. This made it easy to go to galleries, museums, visit friends, see doctors, etc. I now found myself in close quarters with a vast and, for me, new, population. As a pastime, I began photographing other passengers with my iPhone. At the same time, I continued my art in the studio by developing several series of myself behind masks.

In 2017, it was announced that the L train would be closed for 18 months for repairs. What would this mean? How would my life be affected? Would my work practice change? It would not, but the focus, the idea would have a different urgency. I decided to start a new project, painting portraits of the passengers I had photographed. With free, quick, gestural strokes and a palette of both muted and intense colors, I tried to bring life to the gray underground. The speed of my painting reflected, for me, the crowded, ever-moving population of passengers; hurried, contemplative, sometimes angry, occasionally musical and lyrical. Almost half a million of us would be dislocated or stranded every day.

Underground became integrated with above ground. Everywhere I walked, construction crossed my paths. I photographed my altered landscape. The images became backgrounds on which I mounted several of the portraits. This recombination created context which has always been crucial to my art practice. I called the series L Train Bye, Bye. But then, overnight, everything seemed about to change. The governor had somehow discovered a new technology at the last minute. No shutdown, he said. No fast track. But my work would stand with a new title, They Rode the L Train.

Judith Henry is a multi-media artist, born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. After receiving a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, she moved to New York in the late 1960s and started making art that explored the friction between interior life and public persona, developing themes of self-disclosure, identity and loss. She utilizes drawing, photography, typography, video, painting and sculpture. Several of her works resulted in large installations. In addition to exhibiting internationally for decades, in 1976 Henry and artist Jaime Davidovich created Wooster Enterprises, whose conceptual paper products were sold internationally. Her conceptual Crumpled Paper Stationery was produced and sold by The Museum of Modern Art for years. MoMA also commissioned her to produce Overheard on the Way to MoMAQNS when they closed the 53rd Street museum for renovation and temporarily moved to Queens. Judith Henry’s Overheard book series was published by Universe/Rizzoli from 2000 to 2002 and in 2006 Atria Books published her Overheard in America. Henry has shown in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Cleveland, Philadelphia and internationally in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, London and Switzerland. Her most recent solo shows were at BravinLee programs, New York, 2015 and 2018, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2016 and The National Arts Club 2017.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 20)

 
Welcome to the 20th issue of Posit! We’re truly delighted (if a bit amazed) to find ourselves here. And we’re deeply grateful to all of you (worldwide!) who read and view this site — and, especially, to our ever-growing family of contributors, for entrusting their remarkable work to us.

And speaking of remarkable work, the poetry and prose gathered here is, as always, as various as it is impossible to categorize. Nonetheless, as befits the somber chill of mid-winter, much, if not most, of this work grapples with the most ancient of literary preoccupations: mortality. Which is to say, “this absenting / presence, this existence” (Michael Tod Edgerton, Land’s End) — its tragedy, its absurdity, its beauty, and its generative relationship with life and art. The range of approaches in evidence underscores the inexhaustible depth of this subject, as a look at the work of Edgerton, Tyler Flynn Dorholt, Robert Hamilton, Margaret Hanshaw, Simone Muench & Jackie K. White, Rick Snyder, and Anne Riesenberg confirms.

Given this subject matter, it’s not surprising that an elegiac tone weaves through this issue — made emphatic by moments of actual elegy, for Philip Seymour Hoffman (Dorholt), Anthony Bourdain (in the visual art of Miriam Hitchcock), Catullus’ famous sparrow (Snyder) — even Damien Hirst’s decaying shark (Edgerton).

Yet in many of these works, the link between loss and creation gives rise to an understated but persistent optimism — a “calm exhilaration” (Edgerton) which leads us to “savor . . . the Value of imperfect choices” and appreciate the “grace of saying Yes.” (Riesenberg). This is true even — or perhaps, especially — in certain works notable for their silence. Miraculously, it is sometimes in the spaces between what is said (as well as the spare beauty of their language), that the most potent generative potential is located. We’re thinking here, especially, of the poems of Julie Phillips Brown and Alexandra Mattraw, but also, cousin to those ellipses, the ones made visual and tactile by Sonja Johanson’s botanical erasures, the lacunae of which give rise to new structures, even as they mark the destruction they highlight. Plus, cousin to both, Kelly Nelson’s novel translations, which combine departure and tribute to give rise to the shockingly, refreshingly new.

This is not to say that all here is gentle or calm, as a glance at the poems of Robert Hamilton, Muench & White, or Rick Snyder will confirm. Nor that only loss is generative, as Kathleen Hellen’s high octane recombination of language, “sprouting wordsinsideofworlds,” reveals.

But all of the work here offers something new, in the best sense of that over- and abused word. And we are the better for receiving it.

In this excerpt from The Adjacent Possible, Julie Phillips Brown’s “one” evokes the music of solitude. Although the “one” of the poem is so “unaccountable . . . countless, fathomless, and alone” that “words form as burrs and pits,” the haunting beauty of Brown’s own prosody “flowers among the watery veils” to proffer a “cloudself” so transcendent it “wakes as air.“

Tyler Flynn Dorholt’s elegiac litanies of urban living “put on a charge of hope” even as they “gestur[e] toward demise” in their deftly inclusive contemplation of the entanglement of self and other, survival and suffering. Focusing on Jane Street in New York City to “talk. . . about life,” Stoop connects the death of an anonymous pedestrian with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s overdose while “widening / the blood to rise above character,” as well as a singer downing a burger “where Dylan sang / about Emmett Till,” insuring that “when [we] look / at what [we’ve] seen / the scene is [not] . . . overlooked.”

Like Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, Michael Tod Edgerton’s It Closing In It Whispers considers the inextricable bond between death and beauty, provoked, here, not by an urn, but by the “tender,” “erotic,” and “brutal” portraits of Francis Bacon, as well as Damien Hirst’s famous shark “scraping against the glazed skin of the seen” in The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Both poems featured here embody what they respond to: art’s capacity “to call out to call into / being,” compelling us to marvel at how “surprisingly / beautiful [it is] . . . / to be stricken to be / taken,” despite the disturbingly fleeting nature of “anything kin, / in the 21st century, / to transcendance.”

In Senso Unico, Predator & Prey, and Labor Theory of Value, Robert Hamilton sings in a number of forms and tones unified by a voice as erudite as it is forceful in its exploration of the tragic irony of the human condition. These poems expose a species prone to grandiosity, even as it — as we — are trapped by the ‘unique meaning’ of the one-way, no-exit (“senso unico”) trajectory that characterizes a mortality in which “the Ding an Sich cannot be had” and we are not “roaming the wild but caught in a little snow globe with our own figurines hunting a brown little smudge of a beast.”

The stark beauty of Margaret Hanshaw’s imagery confronts us with an existential solitude from which “there are no distinct patterns. / No lessons to be drawn.” What’s more, this “thrashing dystopia” is universal rather than personal, since “strangers occupy the same deep space.” Nonetheless, these poems remind us, there is comfort in the real: “slow light. / A purple ease,” one’s hands like “little balconies” in “the autumn sun.” But most importantly, there is the deep resource of the self, one’s “only house:” “a single mountain” capable of “diving / miles within itself.”

In Kathleen Hellen’s poems, what we do to survive “the tillandtamp of every penny nickeled, every dime a habit” may be the addiction of the lotuseaters, “a made-for-hope numbness as the tactic you have mastered as the happy ending.” Unless, they suggest, “the only way out” is “to be a trickster . . . a fairy in the dome sponging off the glut surviving in the storm and drought.” Either way, the compressed intensity of Hellen’s neologisms are as provocative as they are pleasurable to read.

Sonja Johanson’s botanical erasures inventively combine text with both native and invasive plant parts to spark a dialogue on a number of simultaneous levels. In Divinity, for instance, she uses leaves, Pincushion moss, and a passage from Taltos by Anne Rice to comment upon “this brimming world” of both the poem and this planet in danger of being erased by our own species’ invasive tendencies.

The chiseled mystery of Alexandra Mattraw’s poetry resonates “like a ghost echoing.” Reading these poems confers a pleasure akin to “taking some of the sea into your mouth.” In one of the two poems entitled /Vigil/, a decontextualized “I” “fells speech to splinters.” In the other, it “split[s] infinitives to / engolden dirt and breath” to achieve that great goal of the best art: “holding in / the swarm of things.”

Simone Muench and Jackie K. White mine the sonnet’s dialogic and philosophical affinity to offer marvels of precise, profound, and synthesized resolution. These poems consider, variously, the insecurity of female identity via “the dress [as] a liar laced with history’s lies,” “the desert [as] an armory of black tires . . . murder ballads, and . . . silence strung along barbwire,” and the “garden’s rot, obit, subplot.” All serve as metaphors for the darkness we must lead ourselves out of, if we are to reach “salve or salvage . . . Not quite song / or sugar water, but a wrought ripe, sunlit.”

Kelly Nelson’s erasure-palimpsest-translations reveal the complex delights of the bonds she forges — and detects — between languages. Their insightful and sometimes humorous effects derive at least in part from the juxtaposition of multiple poetic impulses, starting with classic American texts, and ending with Nelson’s doubly-translated erasures. The results are entirely fresh and undeniably her own. In The Day Lady Died, “I spun no feathers around your neck” derives from the verb hilar (to spin). In The Road Not Taken, “I pray to see the possum before it sees me” is the road wished not taken — glad as we are that the twisty paths of these poems were.

Anne Riesenberg’s extraordinary tales “skew ordinary Neediness into a Darker Story” via prose as clear-eyed and unflinching as it is dreamlike, and sometimes surrealistic. Always, though, “Resolution tremble[s] Above . . . its own finely Wrought cloud.” Informed by wisdom, complexity, and compassion, Riesenberg’s resolutions bring us to “savor . . . the Value of imperfect Choices” and “the grace of saying Yes within the context of Love.”

In O Miselle Passer! and Red Tide, Rick Snyder reframes the preoccupations of “high” Western poetic and philosophical thought within the most banal public spaces of contemporary life: waiting rooms. Here, Catullus’ famous sparrow is trapped in an airport “aisle / of plastic blue seats,” while the “bounded lack of boundaries” of extra-linear space is suggested by a fish tank flanked by a plastic plant. These poems expose the inherent comedy of the mundane, even as they prevent us from assuming we can deduce substance from style; their incongruous waiting room fauna raise questions as eternal as any more obviously “poetic” predecessor.

Thank you, as ever, for reading!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

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The intricate constructions of Eozen Agopian incorporate many materials and techniques. Her complex pieces are like small universes, each containing its own private visual logic. Using techniques drawn from sewing and weaving, she uses threads and fabric to push and pull her works into three dimensions from their wall-based origins. Manipulating loose threads over painted and drawn color, she is able to create compositions that seem to vibrate as the color and form are in constant movement. They are intense and beautiful, the eye moving constantly over these landscapes of color and texture.

Judith Henry has created a body of work that will resonate with all those who commute on public transportation. The L Train, a heavily used subway line that runs through Manhattan and into Brooklyn, is a perfect device to use to paint an iconic portrait of urban life. Everyone takes the L train! Using an intimate format (5 x 5 inches) Henry has portrayed her fellow commuters with humor and empathy. Her loose and fluid painting style, superimposed over black and white photographs of the subway, conveys the beat of urban life.

We are presenting a snippet from extraordinary 12-year project, entitled My Brother’s War by Jessica Hines. Hines has sought understanding and closure on her brother’s experience as a soldier in Vietnam. Through photographs and text, both his and hers, she eloquently paints a portrait of both her beloved brother and his experience as a soldier and her family’s loss. It is work that is deeply personal and yet touches us all with its willingness to express love and grief.

Miriam Hitchcock makes mysterious paintings that hint at narrative, but leave the story up to the viewer. Her works on shaped panels capture brief moments of everyday life – a window, a profile, the gesture of a dog walking. Like visual poems, they reveal bits and pieces of color, form and idea which are effortlessly woven into lyrical compositions. We see the connections between her thoughts and observations of the physical world synthesized into images that reflect her contemplative worldview. In these paintings, I perceive the landscape and sunlight of the California coastline, where Hitchcock lives. Clear warm color, with a hint of clouds and sun, infuse her work.

The ceramic and mixed media work of Beth Lo conveys her keen understanding of both her family’s cultural heritage and her experience growing up as a minority in the US. Her wonderful images of children and childhood emerged in her work after the birth of her son and reach back into her own childhood as a potent source of psychological material. The gentle narratives of her finely detailed painting beautifully marry the traditions of ceramic pottery and sculpture with the modernity of her storytelling.

The carved wooden sculptures made by Hirosake Yabe are simultaneously funny, tender and bold. He takes the simplest of forms and gestures and imbues them all with a deep sense of life and humanity. His animals are particularly “human,” suggesting a universal connection between all living beings. His carving is masterful and bold, the marks of the object-making adding to the animation of his figures.

Enjoy!

Melissa Stern