Rendered Paradise

In RENDERED PARADISE, Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson write of and in the intimacy of seeing.

In RENDERED PARADISE, poets Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson invite the reader into the worlds of three major women artists: Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin and Kiki Smith. Dyckman and Robinson bring a radical collaborative approach to this gathering: through their shared vision, contemplation, and creation, each artist's works are encountered as unique presences coming alive in fresh and unexpected ways. RENDERED PARADISE offers diverse and intense pleasures as well as rich problems to consider, including the subject-object relations in artmaking and the women's experiences in the arts and in society. Finally, this remarkable book isn't "about" the artworks it engages with, but is its own work of art, new and wondrous.

"This beautiful collection is radiant with an expansive and responsive generosity on the part of collaborating poets, Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson, who set self aside (surely the lyric's domain) to give full attention to the women artists whose works are their reflective focus. The result is a piercing intensity that renders the visual works of Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin, and Kiki Smith into lyric exultation. We are not offered Maier's 'burnt chair' in poetic simulacrum, for instance, but as transformed by the modulations of the poets' words. An 'act of destruction' has charred the chair, but not changed the fact of it: 'Its glory is its obduracy.' The 'trueness' these poems discover--part revelation, part empathic portal--pulses throughout RENDERED PARADISE, profound and joyous. And heaven it is to dwell in these pages."--Cynthia Hogue

"RENDERED PARADISE is a revelation of the generative power of art. Writing in tandem, without attributing their poems, Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson intimately explore works of art by three pure originals--Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin, and Kiki Smith. The poets animate the artworks with their piercing questions and insights, inspiring candid encounters with each artist. This astonishing collection, with its decentered and imaginative approach to engaging art, breaks new ground for ekphrastic poetry."--Denise Newman

"In RENDERED PARADISE, Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson write of and in the intimacy of seeing. The collaborative form of the book intensifies this intimacy for the reader. 'As I can be two as well, the one who looks, the one who's seen.' The reader becomes an additional focus of the ekphrasis of RENDERED PARADISE, another eye and mind engaged in the looking, reading, writing, and being of the poems. 'When we look at you, we look first at / who first looked at you,' Dyckman and Robinson write. The action of observation and the collaboration of understanding are woven through every line of this gorgeous work." --Pattie McCarthy

Poetry. Art. Women's Studies.

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