UNI-VERSE POETRY - PRINTS - PROOFS BY VISIONARY HUMANS UNITES THE POEMS AND VISUAL ART OF 82 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS TO CREATE A PORTRAIT OF DIVERSITY, MULTIPLICITY, AND ONENESS.
New York, NEW YORK, September 20, 2020 – In times of crisis, art and poetry provide philosophical and spiritual insights, catharsis, and healing. For millennia, artists and poets have been the visionaries whose work possesses the power to capture the full range of human experience, from the horrors of war to the ecstasy of transcendent love. The vision behind this collection is to create a vast wealth of powerful expression that is both deeply enmeshed in the specificity of history and at the same time, an enduring, crucial, human constant. The artists and poets chosen for this book create an intersectional, multi-generational poesis, from David Ferry, who is 96, to Adelaide Holden, 6. Each poem is paired with a visual work, creating an interweaving of human witness that grows exponentially as the book progresses. This is a book to return to over and over, not always starting at the beginning, but finding new vibrant pathways through its proliferating interconnections.
Some of the poets and artists in the book are Tom Sleigh, Rosanna Warren, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Gail Mazur, Alan Shapiro, Roger Bonair-Agard, Elaine Equi, Mel Chin, Deborah Kass, Susan Bee, Michael Joaquin Grey, and Michael Rees.
Following are comments about the book:
“This book is a joy, a rare marvel, a true feast for the senses.” – Rowan Ricardo Phillips, poet, author of Living Weapon, 2013 Whiting Award winner, and professor at Williams College
“Many spreads in this volume embody Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s belief that ‘as long as there is poetry, there will be an unknown, as long as there is an unknown there will be poetry,’ by pairing works of art and poetry that at first look may be unknowable, but create synergy that stole my consonants: “Ooooh!” The oldest and youngest poets bounce off each other eloquently—96-year-old David Ferry, National Book Award winner, paints a stark evocation of a Walker Evans photograph, while Grace MacNair so accurately describes ‘The starlings—/out-swung in sheets’ in ‘The Shape of Air.’ Go spend good time with this volume, as it artfully makes the unknown more knowable.” – Tina Kelley, poet, author of Rise Wildly, and winner of a 2003 Washington State Book Award and a staff Pulitzer Prize at The New York Times
THE BLACK ALBUM
Writings on Art and Culture-Bradley Rubenstein
Spring 2020
The Black Album: Writings on Art and Culture is a collection of writing on contemporary art and culture by writer and painter Bradley Rubenstein. There was once a time when art, technology, science, and poetry collided with politics. Zola and Cézanne. Fénéon and Seurat. Balzac and Rodin. Jean Arp and Hans Arp. Anarchy and beauty combined. In our current moment it seems that we might be well served to remember this past; when art and culture are driven underground, new ideas emerge. Taking Joan Didion’s collection of criticism, The White Album, as a point of reference, Rubenstein creates a new vocabulary for critiquing an age where art has combined with technology, and images are not meant to be trusted. Like Robert Smithson, Rubenstein eschews a personal writing style, instead using science fiction, comedy, and other genre styles to create a lively, continuously changing narrative.
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See some of Bradley Rubenstein's other work here.
Press Eject and Give Me the Tape: Dialogues, Interviews, and Exchanges 2001–2020 is two decades of interviews by the painter and writer Bradley Rubenstein and over 35 painters, sculptors, photographers, and performance and video artists.
It is as important for current discussions on contemporary culture, theory, media, and politics as it is for discussion of contemporary art. The book features interviews with Inka Essenhigh, Michael Rees, Gary Stephan, Angela Dufresne, Pedro Barbeito, Nicola Tyson, Liz Markus, Peter Williams, Anna Ehrsam, Brenda Goodman, Michael Zansky, John Paul, Millree Hughes, and more. Both a slice-of-life view of artists working today and a valuable historical resource for tomorrow.
REVIEWS OF THE BOOK
“As an artist, there is great pleasure in being understood. It is a joy to be interviewed by a fellow artist and writer who fully knows your work, its terms, foundations, and goals. As a reader, it is a joy to have such clear access to each artist’s unique work and voice.”
–Mira Schor, artist and author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture
“These wide-ranging discussions hold artistic, cultural, and social insights that will delight students of sociology, the arts, and anyone who wants a close inspection of artist working methods, influences, and history . . . Press Eject and Give Me the Tape’s intersection of understanding [is] essential for capturing the influences and nuances of today's working artists.”
–D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
“Rubenstein takes pains to step out of his art practice to develop the discipline of checking in with other artists. It is important that he is an artist. The artists give him a certain trust, and he is an adept raconteur. For artists, and especially for those artists who aren’t born yet, books like this are priceless.”
–Michael Rees, professor of sculpture and digital media and director of the Center for New Art at William Patterson University
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bradley Rubenstein is a painter and writer who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His works are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Tang Teaching Museum, The Krannert Art Museum Teaching Collection at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and The Teaching Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. He has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, the Pollock-Krasner Award, and a grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation. He has contributed interviews, essays, and reviews to CultureCatch, Artslant, Battery Journal, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, The Brooklyn Rail, Sharkforum, ArtKrush magazine, New Observations, and Art Journal. Mr. Rubenstein is the author of The Black Album: Writings on Art and Culture.
TO PURCHASE THE BOOK
https://bookshop.org/a/9526/9781732221949
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1732221944
Lost and Found Departments
Heather Dubrow (August 2020)
Portage Poetry Series, Volume 3
Praise for Lost and Found Departments
Heather Dubrow’s Lost and Found Departments is a dexterous and quite moving poetry collection. It’s an ode to poetic craft that, within its rich myriad of voices, structures, and forms, revels in Dubrow’s lexical puckishness, incisive sense of humor, and rather notable ability to discover poetry everywhere and in every thing.
–Rowan Ricardo Phillips, National Book Award finalist
Dubrow’s wit is both charming and disarming as she repurposes mechanical discourse and braids it into a personal and poetic voice. The music in the everyday language, the metaphors and leaps of association, the immediate address, the non-didactic moral pondering, these qualities make one think of Marianne Moore or Kay Ryan. This is a vigorous new poetry that gathers up the tatters of our modern verbal world and makes them sing.
–Bonnie Costello, Boston University
Unabashed by the bawdy pun, the witty one-liner, the surprising punch line, Heather Dubrow’s wonderful Lost and Found Departments takes its place in the long—and serious, but never solemn!—tradition of American humor. In these thematically wide-ranging and formally nimble poems, Dubrow reveals her growing and deepening insight into the mysteries of daily life.
–Ronald Wallace, University of Wisconsin–Madison
With her keen sense of language’s capacity for pleasure and her puckish wordplay, Dubrow’s observances transform into renovations, each renewal made possible through the very words she uses to record thought. In these pages, lost are the places and person whose perils we grieve, the “back home in back there” never to be recovered; found is Dubrow’s wide, careful heart, made wider in the attempting.
–Kimberly Johnson, Brigham Young University
This terrific poet and critic does not exactly Have It All, because no one can have it all, but she certainly has It, where It means whatever transfigures the earthly material of daily life into the aerial architectures of real poems. She’s playful, she’s allusive like nobody’s business, she’ll never “belittle the listener,” and she, too, can “wink at the gremlins/who slink between the lines.”
–Stephanie Burt, Harvard University
About the Author
Heather Dubrow, John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in Poetic Imagination at Fordham University, is the author of Forms and Hollows and two chapbooks. Among the journals where her poetry has appeared are Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review. She was director of Fordham’s Poets Out Loud reading series from Fall 2009 to Summer 2020.