Myers, Lenore M: Afterimages

The sections in Lenore Myers's Afterimages are aptly called galleries, for the reader will find in them a poet's explorations of paintings, sculptures, and other artworks (Balthus, DeFeo, Tarkovsky, and others). These artworks are deconstructed and reconstructed with sharp-eyed linguistic grace and originality as the poet reveals these artworks as collaborations among artists, subjects, and viewers. The collection evolves into a mind's deep inquiry, skillfully shared to become the reader's inquiry. Memories of people and places are woven throughout: family brutalities, complexities, and tendernesses. Afterimages offers the reader the pleasure, discomfort, and understanding gained through an artful response to life.

Lenore Myers was born to artist parents who tried to live as semi-bohemians in the suburbs. When that fell apart, the author spent her childhood and youth moving between different towns in Northern California. After spending more years moving around the United States and abroad, she returned to the greater Bay Area to be near family while raising her son. Her chapbook, Regards to Balthus, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2023. Her poems and essays appear in a variety of literary journals.

"Conventional forms of ekphrasis are often little more than poetic descriptions of art. But there is nothing conventional about Lenore Myers's Afterimages. The poems in this fabulous collection go beyond description, beyond the page, beyond the canvas, beyond looking and seeing, beyond interpretation and reflection, beyond decoding. They participate in what we might call an expanded ekphrasis that takes the dialogue between art and poetry to new levels of interactivity. This is a book that asks big questions about how we perceive and process the acts of making art and engaging with its aftereffects. Art lasts. It lingers. In our heads and in our hearts." — Dean Rader, author of Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly