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Product Description
The poems in Cole Swensen's Try, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, explore the intersection of writing with the visual arts, particularly late medieval and early Renaissance paintings. They also explore writing as a visual vehicle, both as a pattern across a field and as a catalyst for imagery. Looking at the paintings themselves involves examining the way that they make meaning and, in contrast, the way that words make meaning of them and themselves--what happens when you have a representation of a representation? All the poems in this collection weave in and out of proximity to visual work, sometimes from the distance of a gallery viewer, sometimes as a character in the painting itself. Issues of narrative sequences and time float through the collection but are always subordinate to the play and rule of language on the page.
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