landscape portrait figure form
(omnidawn publishing: january 2014) (omnidawn.com)
Named a Best Poetry Book of the Year, Barnes & Noble Review
The poems in this small collection address the many ways the approaches and vocabularies of poetry, painting, and photography overlap. Each poem is a portrait, a picture, a study, or a sketch, and each plays with the techniques both poets and painters obsess over: form, figuration, and line. Subjects of the poems range from Hieronymus Bosch to Frog and Toad to Sesshu Toyo to Adrienne Rich to landscape paintings to family photographs to Mark Twain to Paul Klee. There are lists. There are assassins. There is an adventure poem. There is even a multiple choice poem in which the reader gets to pick the best title.
Praise for Landscape Portrait Figure Form
In these varieties of address and presence, Rader’s work urges a model of subjectivity that recognizes both humans and their poems as parts of one another, greatly in need of ways to see and feel our contact and closeness. Elizabeth Savage, Jacket 2
Rader articulates what we all know but often overlook: that our obsession with the materiality of text and paint—and frequent appraisal of these media as unfit to adequately represent our lives and experiences—resonates deeply with our anxiety about our own physicality, our own finite and incommensurate bodies. Rader reminds us that, as we seek to construct verbally our essentialized self-portraits, we only acquire new, textual bodies, complete with all the earthly encumbrances and stark inadequacies of the old ones. We remain terrified to “wake out of / the wrong body and walk uncovered / into the mistaken world.
Maggie Millner, Zyzzyva
In "Becoming Klee, Becoming Color," Rader writes: "He finds he knows shapes the way the sea/ knows its waves: the thing it flows// in and out of. He sees crimson so clearly he/ becomes crimson, black with such// clarity he turns blind. Instead of image./ Over and over he rides the color wheel// deep into his mind's night, hoping to arrive/ at the right shape." This is a good example of how the poems in Landscape Portrait Figure Form flirt with the metaphysical - i.e., can talking about art still be art? - while presenting something definite: an experience that comments on the artistic but also delivers it, even guiding the reader along. -- Evan Karp, The San Francisco Chronicle
(omnidawn publishing: january 2014) (omnidawn.com)
Named a Best Poetry Book of the Year, Barnes & Noble Review
The poems in this small collection address the many ways the approaches and vocabularies of poetry, painting, and photography overlap. Each poem is a portrait, a picture, a study, or a sketch, and each plays with the techniques both poets and painters obsess over: form, figuration, and line. Subjects of the poems range from Hieronymus Bosch to Frog and Toad to Sesshu Toyo to Adrienne Rich to landscape paintings to family photographs to Mark Twain to Paul Klee. There are lists. There are assassins. There is an adventure poem. There is even a multiple choice poem in which the reader gets to pick the best title.
Praise for Landscape Portrait Figure Form
In these varieties of address and presence, Rader’s work urges a model of subjectivity that recognizes both humans and their poems as parts of one another, greatly in need of ways to see and feel our contact and closeness. Elizabeth Savage, Jacket 2
Rader articulates what we all know but often overlook: that our obsession with the materiality of text and paint—and frequent appraisal of these media as unfit to adequately represent our lives and experiences—resonates deeply with our anxiety about our own physicality, our own finite and incommensurate bodies. Rader reminds us that, as we seek to construct verbally our essentialized self-portraits, we only acquire new, textual bodies, complete with all the earthly encumbrances and stark inadequacies of the old ones. We remain terrified to “wake out of / the wrong body and walk uncovered / into the mistaken world.
Maggie Millner, Zyzzyva
In "Becoming Klee, Becoming Color," Rader writes: "He finds he knows shapes the way the sea/ knows its waves: the thing it flows// in and out of. He sees crimson so clearly he/ becomes crimson, black with such// clarity he turns blind. Instead of image./ Over and over he rides the color wheel// deep into his mind's night, hoping to arrive/ at the right shape." This is a good example of how the poems in Landscape Portrait Figure Form flirt with the metaphysical - i.e., can talking about art still be art? - while presenting something definite: an experience that comments on the artistic but also delivers it, even guiding the reader along. -- Evan Karp, The San Francisco Chronicle