// published in 2020
// sale price $2.25
// poetry |
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| by Nina Murray // a Pen & Anvil chapbook |
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“itemize kindness — no, / atomize / let the sound be your guide” (“resolutions”)
These nine new, unpublished poems read like an art gallery installation, each catching the eye and inviting inspection, contemplation. Murray's wordplay dances from image to image with periodic resettings of the scene initiated by the interspersed prose-poems of dreamlike landscapes. Anxiety and the current pandemic present as motifs throughout.
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This image of a behatted figured examining an unclothed hip is a cropped version of a 1913 self-portrait by Dame Laura Knight showing the artist at work painting a nude model, her friend Ella Naper. At the time, female art students were discouraged from painting live nudes, and left to work from reproductions. When the painting was exhibited in 1914, The Daily Telegraph reviewer Claude Phillips wrote:
Somehow, women painting women hardly ever infuses into her work the higher charm of the “eternal feminine”. This painting is obviously but an exercise, and as such it might quite appropriately have stayed in the artist's studio. It repels, not by any special inconvenance . . . but by dullness and something dangerously near to vulgarity.
Ugh. Herbert Thomas similiarly condescended is his review for The Cornish Telegraph, noting how the painting seemed to him to show the painter's “masculine genius and feminine courage.”
The original painting is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, and in the public domain. |
| About this chapbook series: |
These bite-sized booklets are a mouthful of literature each, intended to be read in a single sitting. When you’re done with one, pass it along! Look for them lying around in Boston, Portland, or New York City. When you see one waiting to be read, go ahead and pick it up. Give it a home in your hands for a ten-minute lit snack. Then when you’re finished, leave it behind for the next person to find, in an ATM lobby, on a train station bench, in the coffeeshop, at the pub.
To request a single copy of any chapbook in the series, or a set of copies in bulk quantity so you can pepper them around your neighborhood, just contact the Pen & Anvil Press and we can put a plan together to mail some over to you. You can reach us via the good folks at the Boston Poetry Union, at 139 Mt. Vernon Street, Fitchburg MA 01420. If you don’t have a stamp, feel free to send us an email.
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