Eidsvig, Kurt Cole: The Simple Art of Murder

Broadstone Books, paperback

Publication Date: February 15, 2024

Publisher Marketing: Artist/poet Kurt Cole Eidsvig critiques the "emptiness / and excess, " and violence, at the heart of contemporary life. The operative word in the title of Kurt Cole Eidsvig's new poetry collection is art, appropriately enough since he is a visual artist as well as author (the cover art is his work and is referenced in the title poem), and alhimself so because of the number of artists (de Kooning, Lichtenstein, Picasso, da Vinci, especially Warhol, many others) and authors (Hemingway, Vonnegut, et.al.) whose works show up here. But if much of this collection is rooted in ekphrasis, that is merely his starting point for a meditation on the "collaboration of emptiness / and excess" at the heart of contemporary life (including a deep dive into his personal life), a catalog of the "Alphabet Soup" of mental illnesses and addictions, and most of all the ubiquity of gun violence (the title derives from a Raymond Chandler essay instructing that "When in doubt, have a man come in the door / with a gun in his hand.") "We know now that art is better for understanding / corpses than for crafting bulletproof vests" he writes, acknowledging the limitations of art to fix the problems of a murderous age. Thus "Today, again, is the first day / of the end of our lives," and "Long remains / our sense of death and dying." He closes with the adage that even if "Everyone wants / to go to Heaven. No one / wants to die." But for all this hard-edged reality and resignation, there is also a note of hope and resolution: "Everyone eventually discards those things / they cannot carry." And that is the simple art of living.