Description
Poetry. Art. In this lambent collaboration, visual artist Marina Adams echoes the spareness of Norma Cole's language with delicate lines that contour muscular negative spaces, sometimes stark and densely foreboding, sometimes luxuriant with color. Norma Cole dialogues with Marina Adams with syncopated poems concerned with fragmentation, transformation, love, precarity, and the tenuousness of kinship between places, things, and being. In ACTUALITIES, poet and artist meditate in tandem, moving between anxiety and reconciliation, in a call and response with one another, and with a cosmos that continuously thwarts knowing, refusing to sit still.
"Actualities opens a charged space between beauty and volatility. This marvelous collaboration between a poet and a painter traces the vital and sometimes liberating complexities of our moment in history's debris field. Together lines and images carry a reader's eye out, as if to sea, then fold back on each other like waves."—Susan Howe
"'How could I have missed it?' writes Norma Cole. And the answer is: Easy, because things go by so fast—or at least they do in this nimble collection of mutually illuminating words, colors, and (in all senses of the word) lines, all of which readily lend themselves to transformations and leave in their wake 'the / reality of / a laugh.' These ACTUALITIES are, I think, what the French call actualités—and (updating Ezra Pound's dictum) Cole the poet and Marina Adams the painter deliver all news, all the time."—Berry Schwabsky
Author Bio
Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Her most recent books of poetry include Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, WHERE AHDOWS WILL: SELECTED POEMS 1988-2008 (City Lights Publishers, 2009), and Natural Light. Her translations from French include Danielle Collobert's It Then, Collobert's Journals, and Jean Daive's A Woman with Several Lives. She has received awards from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry, The Fund for Poetry, the Creative Work Fund and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Marina Adams is a painter who lives and works in both New York City and Parma, Italy. She received her MFA in painting from Columbia University's School of the Arts and a BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Adams has exhibited both in the US and Europe: Marina Adams: Coming Thru Strange at Hionas Gallery, NYC (2013), Marina Adams at Galerie Gris, Hudson, NY (2013), Marina Adams at CUE Art Foundation, NYC (2008), and The Nature of Line at Magazzino d'Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy (1997). Adams frequently collaborates with poets; these exchanges have generated books and limited editions. ACTUALITIES (Litmus Press, 2015) is the fullest expression to date of her exchange with the poet Norma Cole.
Author City: USA