NEW ENGLAND LITERARY NEWS | Boston artist illustrates picture book about Korean War
Williams College poet examines beginning and end in new collection
Jessica Fisher, in her latest collection “Daywork” (Milkweed), examines what begins when something ends. The poems are sensual and propelled by the momentum of history, the past seething and seeping right into the future, which for Fisher is as dark as the night. She returns to all the ifs — “if the young have more fun, if young love was sweeter, if/ hunger’s insatiable, if the bright orange means danger” — and rarely finds the safe and tidy then that offers answer or instruction, an ongoing unconditional. These are poems of seams, in time, in history, in art, “where work ends the work begins,” in the slipperiness of grief, of things contained or uncontained: “was that how you imagined/ the soul: open, ready, very still,/ even if the day itself was windy.” Throughout, Fisher, who teaches at Williams College, shows us the human hand’s ongoing touch on the fabric of things, whether when hosting a sleepover with her daughter’s friends or considering a fresco at a brothel in Pompeii, all of it showing the loom’s constant weaving, “so you see once again/ violence is to beauty/ as the warp to the weft / always somewhere beneath.”
The picture book “The House Before Falling Into the Sea” (Dial) is based on stories that author Ann Suk Wang’s mother told her about sheltering refugees during the Korean War. Kyung, a young girl, watches warily as more and more people show up at her house, people who need help and shelter. She’s asked to share her food and space, and sees these new arrivals in states of fear. When she sees a girl her age fretting, she takes her to throw stones in the ocean. “We sat like two quiet hills, the breeze combing through our hair.” But war is close, “and it felt like the darkness followed me. I tried swallowing it down, hiding it in my knot-tied belly.” The book is evocatively illustrated (above) by Caldecott Honor award-winning RISD grad and Boston resident Hanna Cha, with expressive sweeps of ocean and gold wheat in the wind, capturing the tension and fear in the faces and bodies of people taking shelter when the war sirens sound, and the relief and gratitude when people are made to feel safer together.
Taking the form of the book as launch pad and inspiration, and occupying a space that can be both library and museum, artists’ books exist at a crossroads of graphic design, printmaking, photography, poetry, sculpture, other visual arts, publishing, and experiment writ large. Thursday through Saturday of this week, Boston University hosts Multiple Formats, a contemporary art book symposium and art book fair, offering a series of workshops, lectures, and a daylong fair on Saturday featuring over 135 exhibitors showcasing their design work and creative processes. Ashley James, associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York will give the keynote address on Thursday evening. On Friday, artist Panayiotis Terzis and others will lead risograph workshops; Esther K. Smith will lead a bookbinding workshop; and participants have the chance to help create a typeface in a live letterform drawing performance. On Saturday, the art book fair runs from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., bringing in a huge range of national and international artists and exhibitors, including local Boston Art Review, Boston Ujima Project, Staircase Books, MassArt Zine Scene, and many others. Multiple Formats takes place Thursday, March 21-Saturday, March 23 at Boston University’s School of Visual Arts, 808 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. All events are free and open to the public. For more information, visit multipleformats.cargo.site.
Coming out
“The Possessed” by Witold Gombrowicz, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Black Cat) “Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema” by Maggie Hennefeld (Columbia University) “A Chance Meeting: American Encounters” by Rachel Cohen (NYRB Classics) Pick of the week
Andrew Devrell of Books on the Square in Providence, Rhode Island, recommends “Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands” by Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly): “This chronicles Beaton’s time working in the oil sands of Alberta in order to pay off student debt. At once a loving memoir of home, for Beaton’s home in Nova Scotia is both the beginning, the end, and the mostly unspoken backdrop to all of what happens in Alberta, as well as an uncompromising look at the very bleak and isolating life people lead in the remote areas where the oil sands are. Beaton pulls no punches in illustrating what kinds of lives are led, all the various traumas such a life produces, and the corrupt way the companies deal with the trauma. Sobering and enlightening, but also a very nuanced story of one woman’s journey in an overwhelmingly male world.”