Poetry. Jessica Baran's ekphrastic poems challenge the way we encounter the aural, visual, and textual artifacts of artists and thinkers as varied as Sergio Leone, Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, and Hank Williams. Strange and intriguing, Baran is a voyeur who provides heuristic glimpses into new aesthetic experiences. These poems peek into the tangling and untangling complexities of a performance by Jan Bas Ader, a poem by Wallace Stevens, or a video installation by Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Baran is as wildly adept in her investigations of the filmic gaze in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as she is in her poetic misprision of Derrida's Specters of Marx or in her inhabiting of a song by Metallica. REMAINS TO BE USED invites and disorients, changes lenses, and ultimately trespasses the interior worlds of objets d'art.

Author City: SAINT LOUIS, MO USA

Jessica Baran is assistant director of the White Flag Projects in St. Louis and the art writer for the Riverfront Times. REMAINS TO BE USED is her first book of poems.