Self Portrait in a Dark Room

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"Self Portrait in a Dark Room" explores how individual moments of awareness can be connected to create a life story. These poems have an ekphrastic impulse - many of them are based on the paintings, drawings, and words of Vincent van Gogh - but a better of reading them would be as improvisations on themes: presence, absence, pain, love, and how we "spill our light" in the world. The speaker is various. Sometimes the poet, sometimes the painter - and sometimes a mixture of the two. And although the book tells a story, "getting / it right wasn't the point." The reader is invited to be a participant, not merely a spectator, in the recreation of the larger artistic narrative.

(Poems entirely in quotes, and all quoted sections within poems, are taken directly from Van Gogh's letters, as published in Dear Theo, edited by Irving Stone. Other poems freely borrow Van Gogh's language, ideas and images.)