Tits on the Moon features a dozen “stage poems,” many of which Dessa performs at her legendary live shows; they’re funny, weird, and occasionally bittersweet. The collection opens with a short essay on craft (and the importance of having a spare poem around for when the power goes out). Proudly published by Rain Taxi in association with Doomtree, Tits on the Moon features a stunning cover pressed with gold foil and structurally embossed, designed by Studio on Fire.
$15, plus $4 shipping in the U.S.; contact us for International shipping costs
Sponsored by the University of Minnesota Libraries Tuesday, October 11, 2022 6:00 p.m. Central
Please join us to celebrate the winner of the 2022 Kerlan Award, the renowned Andrea Davis Pinkney! This event is free to attend.
The Kerlan Award is given annually by the Friends of the Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature at the University of Minnesota Libraries in recognition of singular attainments in the field, and that certainly applies here: Andrea Davis Pinkney is the distinguished and bestselling author of numerous books for children and young adults, including picture books, novels, and nonfiction. Her books have received multiple Coretta Scott King Book Awards, Jane Addams Honor citations, nominations for the NAACP Image Awards, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor medal, and many other accolades. In addition to her work as an author, Ms. Pinkney has had an illustrious career as a children’s book publisher and editor, including as founder of the first African American children’s book imprint at a major publishing company, Jump at the Sun.
Pinkney also is the librettist for the Houston Grand Opera’s “The Snowy Day Opera,” based on the beloved bestselling children’s picture book classic “The Snowy Day” by Ezra Jack Keats. She has served on the creative teams for several theatrical and audio productions based on works for young people, including those drawn from among her acclaimed books, “Martin Rising: Requiem for a King,” “The Red Pencil,” and “Rhythm Ride: A Trip through the Motown Sound.” She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Purchase books by Andrea Davis Pinkney from Red Balloon Bookshop:
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About the Kerlan Collection
The Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature stands at the forefront of children’s literature archives worldwide. An internationally recognized children’s literature library and archive, the Kerlan holds more than 100,000 children’s books, original manuscripts, correspondence, artworks, galleys, color proofs, and other material for more than 1,700 authors and illustrators. Open to the public at the University of Minnesota’s Elmer L. Andersen Library, the Kerlan is a rich resource for researchers, educators, families, and all who love children’s literature.
Join us for a virtual visit with the international bestselling British author Booklist calls a “genre master,” Jeffrey Archer. At this special publication day event, Archer will discuss his latest novel, Next in Line, with Minnesota mystery writer Carl Brookins.
Free to attend, registration required. We hope to “see” you there!
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About the Book
In this latest installment of Jeffrey Archer’s acclaimed William Warwick series, set in 1988, royal fever sweeps the nation as Britain falls in love with the “people’s princess,” Princess Diana. For Scotland Yard, this means the focus is on protecting the most famous family on earth, and a weak link could spell disaster. When it becomes clear a renegade organization has the security of the country in its sights, the question is: which target is next in line? During Archer’s tenure as a member of the UK Parliament and volunteer work as a charity auctioneer, he worked with the late Princess Diana on numerous occasions, and he has sought to channel her effervescent warmth, mischievous sense of humor, and world-beloved humanity in this novel, which appears shortly after the 25th anniversary of her untimely passing.
About the Authors
Jeffrey Archer, whose novels and short stories include the Clifton Chronicles, the William Warwick novels, Kane and Abel, and Cat O’ Nine Tales, has topped the bestseller lists around the world, with sales of over 275 million copies. He is the only author ever to have been a number one bestseller in fiction, short stories and non-fiction (The Prison Diaries). A member of the House of Lords for over a quarter of a century, he is married to Dame Mary Archer, and they have two sons, two granddaughters, and two grandsons.
Carl Brookins writes the Michael Tanner and Mary Whitney sailing adventure series, the Sean Sean private investigator detective series, and the Jack Marston academic series. He has reviewed mystery fiction for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press and elsewhere; before he became a mystery writer, he was a photographer, television program director, and college teacher, and he continues to be an avid recreational sailor. A member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Private Eye Writers of America, he lives with his wife Jean in Roseville, Minnesota.
Although often sentimentalized, motherhood can be a distinctly jarring experience, one rife with resurfaced pains, tender loves, and the echo of long-lost memories. In The Child, Kjersti A. Skomsvold does not shy away from the brutal truth of the matter; she exposes us to a luminous, impassioned chronicle in which the tragedies and ecstasies of motherhood will trample and simultaneously renew the heart of the reader with unbridled force.
With lines like “I thought about the deepest darkness in which the child lay, and there I was, making it even darker with all my miserable thoughts,” Skomsvold breathes life to depression; deep-set anguish is laced in prose-poetic language, and a shot of raw intensity penetrates its pith. Recollection of this darkness that sweeps through the psyche and stalks it with infirmity, self-loathing, and sorrow is juxtaposed with vignettes regaling the euphoria of life in the form of a budding relationship with the narrator’s husband Bo — and a palpable being budding into existence.
Life is chock-full of regrets and woe. The narrator has an old lover too, one with whom she has a powerful but tumultuous bond — and she witnesses first-hand the decay of this lover, as he slips into bleak pitfalls, alcoholism, and numbness to life without her. As he plummets further and further into despair, she realizes she must sever the bond. Not long after, however, the lover commits suicide. “I think he wanted to live, but that it was too difficult for him.”
In the process of burgeoning motherhood, all these memories come surging back to her, though she wonders “if the guilt I feel means that I’m guilty.” She is frightened by her memories; she believes they may poison her forthcoming children and her relationship with Bo, and that she may be too broken to live a life of her own. Untamed ripples of pain divorce her from rationality, engulf every ounce of her vitality. But when she first bonded with the man, she learned to untangle the mass of her unresolved traumas and, for the first time, discovered the freedom of vulnerability. It is a gradual process. She must write, she must declare love, because in doing so, she lays herself bare for others to see, and more importantly, for herself. When she says, “I felt life streaming into me,” she persuades us that our life, too, may be worth preserving.
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As Anglophile readers and art lovers already know, the Bloomsbury Group included several British writers, artists, and intellectuals who lived, studied, or worked together in or near London’s historical Bloomsbury district in the first half of the twentieth century. Many of these figures are little known today, but some, like Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, are still household names. Two recent books, both profusely illustrated and written by authorities in the field, rejuvenate the memory and legacy of the Bloomsbury men and women who, even though they did not consider themselves an official organization, ushered in new waves of artistic expression.
The Bloomsbury Group began in 1904 when Vanessa Stephen (aged 25) and her siblings Thoby (24), Virginia (23), and Adrian (21) moved from their parental home to a new one in Bloomsbury. Their father, the prominent literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen, had died in February that year, and their mother Julia had passed in 1895, after which the family lived in grief. The four siblings, all intellectuals, wished to leave their conservative, patriarchal, gloomy Victorian background behind and create a “house of their own.” As Virginia recalled after she married Leonard Woolf in her account titled “Old Bloomsbury,” “We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins . . . we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be new . . .”
Thoby Stephen, a Cambridge graduate, invited his circle of friends to join the Stephens’ Thursday evening “at home” gatherings; known as the Cambridge Apostles, this group included Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, and E.M. Forster. The Cambridge contingent was greatly influenced by the English philosopher George Edward Moore, author of Principia Ethica (1903), who believed in the importance of physical beauty, pleasure, and personal relationships in life, rather than the abstract, metaphysical, or idealistic views of the nineteenth century—an idea which the Stephens siblings adopted wholeheartedly as well.
Frances Spalding’s The Bloomsbury Group (National Portrait Gallery, $24.95) is published by the National Portrait Gallery in London, which houses many photographs and paintings of Bloomsbury Group members. Spalding (who has previously written biographies of Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant) touches on the life stories of nineteen Bloomsbury writers, painters, and intellectuals. Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, who did the most to hold the group together, are justifiably pivotal figures in the book; missing from the list, however, are their brothers Thoby and Adrian. Although Thoby died in 1906 (an untimely death from typhoid fever he contracted during a trip to Greece), his death brought the Cambridge Apostles and the Stephens closer. Adrian introduced not only his gay friends Duncan Grant and David Garnett but also Freudian psychology to the group, becoming (along with his wife Karin) one of the first British psychoanalysts. Vanessa, shortly after the death of Thoby, married Clive Bell, and the couple had an open marriage; indeed, open marriages, triangle relationships, homosexuality, and bisexuality were common among the many members of Bloomsbury.
Reading through Spalding’s book, it becomes apparent how close-knit the Bloomsbury Group was. For instance, Freud’s Complete Psychological Works—published by the Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which also released books by T. S. Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, and Virginia Woolf herself—was translated and edited by James Strachey (Lytton’s younger brother). The index for the entire twenty-four volumes was compiled by Frances Partridge, the wife of Rex (“Ralph”) Partridge, who was previously married to Dora Carrington (Lytton Strachey’s partner).
Wendy Hitchmough’s The Bloomsbury Look (Yale University Press, $45) uses nearly 180 archived photographs, paintings, and cultural materials to visualize the lives and works of the Bloomsbury Group. Hitchmough is well positioned to write this fascinating book: She was curator for more than a decade at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, where the Bloomsbury painters lived and created art works beginning in 1916 (Duncan Grant continued to live there until his death in 1978). The Bloomsbury Look begins with an informative introduction to the group’s imagery and identity, followed by chapters analyzing the group’s photographs, fashions, and their decorative arts and paintings—all a big part of the group’s activities.
Perhaps at no point in history had literary and visual artists so closely interacted with each other as happened in Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf, in search of a modern literary style, was so impressed by the post-impressionist works of her painter friends that she set aside the rigid rules of plot and characters, and created novels based on “stream of consciousness” and “inner dialogue,” as evident in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. Paintings of humans with no facial features found their equivalence in Woolf’s novels as non-articulated feelings and meanings. The Bloomsbury artists were not interested in big-picture politics or historical heroes; they were more concerned with ordinary people and small things of daily life. Not surprisingly, the members inspired and supported each other in many ways; they read and critiqued each other’s works; they painted each other’s portraits; they wrote thousands of letters to each other and wrote about each other in diaries as well as books (Virginia Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry was published in 1940, and E.M. Forster’s biography of Virginia Woolf was published in 1942, only a year after Woolf drowned herself).
The sheer quantity of writings, paintings, and cultural materials that the Bloomsbury Group produced is staggering. The group was active, on and off, for six decades, from 1904 until the death of Vanessa and Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf in the 1960s. Interestingly, as the Bloomsbury leaders were fading away, their legacy was starting to be rediscovered by a new generation of free spirits, hippies, and feminists. The Bloomsbury Group came mostly from upper-class families; they, however, rejected bourgeoise mentality, and created their own sort of fashionable Bohemian lifestyle. Centennial celebrations of the Bloomsbury Group in 2004 coincided with the death of Francis Partridge, aged 103, the last surviving member of the group.
As the bibliography at the end of Hitchmough’s book shows, a large number of books have been published on the Bloomsbury Group: There are individual biographies as well as coffee-table books, encyclopedic handbooks, and detailed histories of the entire group (one of the earliest ones was written by Quentin Bell, Vanessa Bell’s son). Nevertheless, these two new illustrated works by Spalding and Hitchmough bring a fresh breeze to the life stories and legacy of the Bloomsbury Group, which has exerted a huge impact on literature, art, thought, and even fashion in our age.
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“So you think that you can live remote / from city streets paved with bullet casings, / mass shootings in churches, refugee mothers in cages,” Pamela Uschuk questions in “A History of Morning Clouds and Contrails,” challenging both herself and the reader. Fortunately, it’s a challenge well met; Refugee reveals itself through a tapestry of well-crafted poems of urgency and the hope for meaningful change. Uschuk, winner of an American Book Award, here rejects the assumption that nature poetry is apolitical or unengaged with the social realm, instead asserting that climate crisis is inseparable from human crisis, domestic and international. She also rejects the myth of the solitary poet and draws on community, which she defines as an ecosystem of people, flora, and fauna. Through poems that powerfully render a world where individual action holds value and every life is one that matters, Refugee chronicles the many ways in which environmental and political disaster, cancer, and racism affect our ability to exist, live, and thrive. Through the literal and the metaphorical, the sensory and the narrative, Uschuk urges this recognition: “The mountains are burning and we cannot sleep.”
Uschuk begins Refugee with two epigraphs that serve as an anchor, pulling the reader into a bardic relationship in which the poems become messengers; they ask for writer, speaker, and reader to address their own obligations to the content and how it relates to the wellness of the world. Uschuk offers first Audre Lorde’s powerful acknowledgment that “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” She follows this with an excerpt from Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” a poem that riveted the world in the wake of 9/11. With these epigraphs, Uschuk sets the tone and the expectations for the collection ahead, as if warning: Yes, reader, I implicate myself, I implicate my country, and you, too, must join the work for social, political, and environmental justice.
Refugee is divided into four sections, titled “Skull Song,” “Axis,” “Liquid Book of the Dead,” and “Speaking of Angels and Ghosts,” respectively. The sections grow in length, from seven poems to eleven to fifteen to nineteen, creating a crescendo-like accumulation, of story, tension, and the sensory as a place for healing and discourse. Throughout, images are interwoven with specific political moments from 2016 to 2021, harrowing occasions that highlight the need for greater understanding and action.
In poems such as “Solar Eclipse in the Land of Sandstone Hoodoos and Cranes,” the collection highlights the speaker’s varied interactions with her environments, including beautiful (but not romanticized) depictions of Arizona, Florida, and the Himalayas. In many instances, Uschuk weaves resonance between these locales and the resilience needed to overcome cancer: “I have to make you sick to make you well, / the oncologist says, five months / we’ll scour each cell of your abdomen clean.” In doing so, Uschuk departs from the taught hierarchy of worth and recognizes how survival and death equalize us all, from the human to the hummingbird. In the sonnet “Green Flame,” the speaker portrays one such hummingbird and its death after hitting the poet’s window: “Too weak from chemo not to cry / . . . / I lifted her weightlessness into my palm.” The poem ends: “Mourning doves moaned, who, who / oh who while her wings closed against the tiny body / sky would quick forget as soon as it would forget mine.” Through poems like this, Uschuk cultivates a position of empathy and reflection, understanding that both are required for forward motion.
Throughout Refugee, Uschuk does not shy away from the difficult, and she uses particular species as entry points into much-need conversations about human rights. In “Cracking One Hundred,” Uschuk narrates a scene where “preschoolers worry about butterflies” being able to fly over the U.S.-made border wall along Mexico; by conjuring this image, Uschuk addresses the camps where children and parents seeking asylum are separated and held under inhumane conditions. The poem closes with a reference to the president’s declarations from “across the lush White House lawn where Monarch butterflies, / who’ve migrated all the way from Mexico, land / on bright rose petals.” Likewise, in “Talking Crow,” Uschuk immerses the reader in our nation’s history of violence, from lynch mobs to continued police brutality: “Here bullet holes chip downtown streets, / alternative facts to ropes slung over oak / branches that still remember”; the poem builds to the sonic echo of crows imitating the words of “mothers, wives” and “a child’s witness face”: “Don’t shoot. Don’t / shoot”—an irrefutable exposure of the oppressive systems that pervade American society.
Reaching the final poem of Refugee, “Gardenias at Easter,” one is compelled to start again at the beginning; the realizations she has offered permeate like “the gardenias that resurrect us, . . . call us back // ecstatic to the forgotten.” In this powerful collection grounded in the now, Uschuk calls for the re-membering and reconstructing of perceptions between place, animal, plant, and human.
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The lost subtext of climate change is not in the mounds of data or winnowed diversity of lost species and habitats, the redrawn frost lines or earlier arrivals of “spring”—it’s in how denial has disfigured humanity. Is there even language for the uncanny shapes taken by time and space in this moment? Deep into A.E. Copenhaver’s novel My Days of Dark Green Euphoria, her protagonist Cara pokes the news buttons of her vehicle’s radio, thinking, “What fun to ponder the vocabulary of climate change with a reporter . . . whether climate breakdown, crisis, or emergency was more appropriate . . . while roaring down the freeway at seventy-seven miles per hour, getting fourteen miles per gallon.”
Winner of the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature, My Days of Dark Green Euphoria travels at that velocity. Cara, who seeks to maintain a negative carbon footprint, works at a nonprofit that advocates for more ecologically responsible choices and daily sorts through the Whole Foods dumpster for her breakfast on her way to work. She refuses to establish a permanent address; rather, she only housesits, shrinking into the lives of others. Stung with perpetual self- (and species-) awareness, she journeys within a “small, sad self.” From the moment that she was appointed as the “primary outhouse coordinator” in a school internship, this cursed insight has led her into an “eerie kind of evolutionary exile.” Her tolerance for other human beings has almost disappeared, although she realizes that solitude is not sustaining. Locating herself somewhere between the prophet Jonah’s Nineveh and Thoreau’s Walden, she has reached the recognition that there is “nothing noble anymore in living isolated from society.”
Through a housesitting gig, Cara meets Dan. Their relationship “works” through mutually satisfying sex and heightened “alone time” due to Dan’s intense travel schedule for his job, but Cara tries to imagine stitching her life further into his. One night, she puts him through an unknowing test as she watches him deal with a spider in the bathroom. Will he simply kill it? She furtively observes him in this eco-moral dilemma, then celebrates that he has to leave on business immediately thereafter, joyful “lest I allow my disappointment in him to fester into passive-aggressive reality.” The next weekend at brunch she meets Dan’s mother, Millie, who takes an entranced Cara out for a pedicure, street tacos, and a memorable trip down the liquor aisle in Target. Fascinated by the depth of Millie’s unthinking consumption, Cara crashes somewhere between the cosmetics counter and the drive home, having been derailed by their pilgrimage for fun.
The anxieties of finding an impossible balance that most of us feel ring deeply and physically from the outset of this novel. A wounded creature on a wounded planet, Cara seeks “some kind of sublimation . . . so [her] entire being disappears into ecological harmlessness.” Numbed and enraged, she follows cycles of self-denial and hopelessness; neuro-prophet and YouTube viewer, she recognizes that the necessary remedy is somewhere “deeper than molecular repair.” In COVID-tide, where so many of us feel spun between guilty binges of junk TV while also being laid open to the ugly realities at hand, Copenhaver’s insights strike a chord. Cara laments, “This was not the land of freedom; this was the land of dependency and disconnect,” and she realizes that everything is “bought and paid for . . . with the very fabric of our existence.” Against and within this insight, Cara works to come to terms with being alive in an increasingly broken world. With language that both makes the reader laugh out loud and awakens a cutting empathy, the novel follows her embodied journey splendidly.
Given its humor, sharp voice, and playful tone, readers might be tempted to label My Days of Dark Green Euphoria as Sex in the City turned inside out, with fewer characters and fuller ecological angst. Copenhaver, though, reaches much deeper into our consciousness of the shifts around and within us. This is a tough novel, replete with Cara’s consumption of graphic videos of the food-industrial complex and intense moments of personal disintegration. At the opening of the novel, she notes, “It’s almost a talent, to read the subtext of the world.” Copenhaver has brought that story into the light of our eerie present, recognizing the force of denial and how deeply planetary crisis has been a part of ourselves and our days.
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Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done is destined to join the upper echelons of the pantheon of craft books. Like Peter Ho Davies’s The Art of Revision (Graywolf Press, 2021), the book focuses on an oft-neglected aspect of fiction writing: revision. What’s more, he provides useful advice specific to novel writing, another underrepresented aspect. Bell’s three-draft approach begins not with a rough draft but with a “generative revision.” The emphasis here is on “an exploratory, organic, and above all playful approach” that will get words on the page and provide fodder for subsequent drafts.
As revision is recursive, Bell notes that these are better referred to as “stages,” which require moving both forward and backward, rather than drafts. No matter where one is in this process, Bell’s guidance will assist and encourage. Each chapter contains useful subheadings that allow readers to dip in and out as needed. For instance, “First Draft: Forward Progress, Generative Revision” includes sections such as “Learn What Book You’re Not Writing” (addressing the need to narrow one’s focus) and “Feed Your Imagination” (which includes a discussion of art versus life: “You’ll need to draw upon the art/life experience you already have, while replenishing and enlarging your experiential stockpile whenever you find your supply of inspiration wearing down.”) Bell provides one of the most useful explanations of these aspects around, in down-to-earth language that will help writers achieve these aspirations.
While “First Draft” is the longest chapter, its generative approach prepares writers for the work to come. For as much time as it takes most writers to get the first draft on paper, Bell views it as “not the novel itself but an idea of what a novel could be.” Moving from this “scale model” to the novel it will become requires new strategies, including what Bell calls a “narrative outline,” drawing on work from Anna Kesey and Jim Shepard, both of whom address pacing and what the latter refers to as “the rate of revelation.” Bell uses this outline to create a plan to “better take advantage of the inherent qualities in the structure you’ve chosen.” Following this, he recommends rewriting the book, beginning to end. This is time-consuming, but he argues that “the raw confusion of what book am I writing? will recede as you become surer and surer of what it is you’re making.”
This increased confidence will propel writers into the third draft, which supplies the book’s subtitle. Bell preaches patience throughout this process, recommending shifting editing between screen and paper, reading aloud, and “break[ing] the prose into manageable chunks.” These are in service to “figuring out less what happens and more the best way to show it happening.” Refuse to Be Done’s three-draft approach may not be able to provide the what of a novel’s plot, but it will help in virtually every other aspect of the process. All writers, whether first-time or experienced, will benefit from allowing Matt Bell to serve as their novel-writing guide.
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The cover of marcus scott williams’s damn near might still be is what it is immediately clues readers in to the lower-case, mostly punctuation-free writing they’ll encounter throughout the book’s six sections. Anyone who regularly communicates via text will be familiar with the style, abbreviations, and slang the author uses, though grammar purists will be instantly nauseous—and they deserve it, because the prose here connects more genuinely because of this neglect of the rules, not despite it. The book is organized around one to two page “posts,” not unlike captions you might see on a writer’s Instagram page or website. The similarity these passages (sometimes as short as one sentence or less) have to social media is apparent instantly, and it heightens the material.
damn near takes place in a multitude of locations—Denver, New York, Milan, London, etc.—as well as at a great deal of unidentified places on U.S. roads. Often reading like a travel diary, the book draws the reader in with williams’s blunt sincerity about things like eating, drinking, and rest stops, as well as by the inclusion of a dozen or so companions never fully described in exposition. This is a technique first popularized by Frank O’Hara, and it’s a good one, as we come to see the characters not just as the author’s friends, but as our own. The sparkling, near-poetic prose comes across as the result of happy accidents instead of deliberate intention; the author feels like a gifted bohemian who, again like O’Hara, might step away from a party to write a bit before returning.
This global trek isn’t in any way mired down by pretension, and williams isn’t afraid to mention the realities of Panda Express or sleeping on couches. No matter the scenery in front of him, he never fails to mention some telling detail, like that every step is taken in “espresso-splattered Doc Martens.” This counterpoint is fresh compared to so much writing by individuals eager to express how streetwise they are. Williams is a world traveler, but he deliberately grounds the reader in his voice, establishing that this is a personal view, not a pristine, unopinionated travel guide.
No matter the subject, the voice of prose either sinks or swims; here, all this clever technique is buoyed by williams’s down-to-earth voice, which is full of painful self-awareness and surprising humor; the book takes itself seriously, but only just enough, a line that is hard to define no matter where you’d like to be on it. Ultimately, damn near might still be is what it is succeeds because williams trusts his audience not to require him to dress his talent up, which is as startling as it is appreciated.
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Edited by Jessica Hundley and Pam Grossman Taschen ($40)
by Patrick James Dunagan
What makes a witch a witch, and what is witchcraft for? These are among the central questions explored in the lavishly illustrated Witchcraft, the latest release in Taschen’s Library of Esoterica series. Images of witches throughout the ages and in various styles are robustly represented, with visualizations of the coquettish and the stridently sexy appearing alongside hags of old and earth mothers of today. The illustrations are notable for being reproduced at remarkably high quality—which is essential, for often the artists have included key details buried in murky colors and shading. It’s wonderful to be able to notice what’s lurking in dark corners.
Not surprisingly, a colossal number of brooms, cauldrons, ghouls, devils, goats, wands, and outdoor fire dances make appearances in Witchcraft, yet there are also tranquil moon-lit scenes and lush woodland vistas aplenty. Nowadays witches are far less commonly viewed as raggedy and grotesque, flying around on brooms in the night and menacing town and countryside alike. Much discussion in this book is thus given over to unpacking the vast number of preconceptions and misunderstandings about witches, part of a growing tolerance that helps witches today stand proud, announcing themselves to the public without fear or hesitancy. In many communities, particularly in the arts, declaring oneself a witch is even fashionable.
For that reason, it’s also not too surprising that many an artist in Witchcraft self-identifies herself, or rarer himself, as a witch. Practitioners of the arts and the occult readily share affinities: “Like a witch, the artist conjures, shapes reality, manifests . . . One makes magick. One engages in ‘the craft.’” Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, for example, are two artists associated with Surrealism whose work is included in this book. Close friends while living in the expatriated European community in Mexico City, they were both influenced by occultism; in works by such artists, “many aspects of the witch in art history and in the popular imagination were revisited and reimagined,” opening paths to a wider reinterpretation and embracing of witchcraft. Visual artists Betye Saar and Cameron, for example, both from Los Angeles, offer wonderful instances of the artist embedding (as well as embodying, in Cameron’s case) witchcraft symbolism and practice in works of art.
Many more examples of the Artist-as-Witch abound, and this book may inspire readers to think of them. In the literary world, novelist Norman Mailer's avowed maintenance of his “relationship” to substances (whiskey and pot) in his writing practice seems as witchy as poet Diane di Prima's 1980s declaration that she started putting on a few pounds in order to keep the demons out. Poetry examples are in fact numerous: Alice Notley has used the symbol of a white owl often, and during the presidency of George W. Bush, described her recurring dream of such a creature carrying him far away from the White House; Joanne Kyger developed a practice of breathing along with the bamboo across from her front porch, welcoming and congratulating its breath with her own. Witchcraft invites and celebrates readers making connections such as these, identifying the predominance of witchy practice that inundate and intersect with creative life.
Witch Janet Farrar sounds much like a poet when she makes this recommendation to aspiring witches: “Read as much as you can, but be critical of what you read. Stick to your original vision of what craft is, and don’t be swayed by those who try to shoehorn you into their form of practice.” Any MFA candidate in poetry would be wise to follow this tip. Such common-sense advice is found everywhere in these pages, as in this discussion of practicing Necromancy: “the dead will become visible to you, and you will be able to request information from them. Speak politely and wear an amulet.”
Several statements by contemporary witches demonstrate how witchcraft is not only useful, but essential in our rapidly diversifying appreciation for each other’s differences. “The witch can help us find our way through what I call ‘the evolutionary chaos of now,’” says Robin Rose Bennett, and Edgar Fabián Frías observes that “Witches banish borders and binaries and allow for prismatic visions to take root.” At its heart, witchcraft focuses on the liberation of the individual. Like all good anti-establishment heroes, “Witches only care about empire when they want to burn it down.”
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