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
"The poems in Lenore Myers's debut collection Afterimages explore the complex interactions between artist and subject, including the darker implications of aesthetic 'mastery'—manipulation, cooptation, objectification, even abuse—in which the artist strives to 'capture the soul' of a subject, confine it in a frame, and offer it to the public as a salable commodity. Myers's poems seek to break the confining frame and to restore the reified self to the dynamic, if destabilizing, dance of becoming. And as if that weren't plenty (it is), she also recognizes how her own practice as poet relates to an artist's originating efforts, placing her subjects and herself in the 'little rooms' of her stanzas. If you want to know how art can make a difference in our lives, read these poems." — John Canaday, author of Critical Assembly: Poems of the Manhattan Project
"This book is 'ekphrastic,' but it is so much more than that. Myers looks with a painter's eye at troubling childhood memories and at paintings with the view of an empathic fellow sufferer. Her technique is impeccable. Her eye is reminiscent of Bishop, and her ear recalls the Black Mountain poets at their best." — Alan Williamson, author of Franciscan Notes and Dante and the Night Journey
"Like the Balthus paintings the poet meticulously 'regards,' these poems are smart and beautifully rendered. A stunning weave of ekphrastic poetry and memoir, every word of Myers's remarkable first book dazzles." — Karen Brennan, author of Television, a Memoir
