Excited that Tupelo Quarterly just published my review of Emmalea Russo’s interesting book, G, in which G stands for garden but many many other things, too.

“There are no sensuous swelling tomatoes in this book, no tender seedlings, no pat lessons about humility or patience drawn by a thoughtful poet-gardener embodied in a stable ‘I.’ This is a project of a different kind—an abstract investigation of mind and language, where the garden is a kind of whiteboard, and the writer tries out different linguistic formulae on its surface.”

I can’t find a good place online to point you to Richard Crozier’s Charlottesville paintings, so here are a few photographed out of a book. Forgive the distortions:

These are slyly nontraditional, I think, part of a painterly lineage yet still subversive in their framing of interstitial, forgotten, nonglorious, destroyed places in the town.

It’s important to keep looking this way, because this is most of what reality is, the reality we’ve collectively built, the reality that fences us in or out in different ways, scribbles across the visual field, forces us to stop and makes our familiar places into rubble.

Charlottesville is a place I know, so there are extra resonances for me in these images. But any town looks mostly like this, most of the time. Even this far into art history, our art still doesn’t usually admit that.