Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Art. Collaboration. Although Waxman's paintings are to be sensed through the eyes, her pieces are not oculocentric, that is, oculos as logos. Instead, unpredictable contours of 'reality' continuously re-elasticize our lived-life 3-dimensions into 4ths and 5ths. Wagner riffs off of Waxman's explorations, stripping singular words of excess referentiality, assiduously avoiding rounding off predictable lyrical contours. Wagner, rather, makes the edges of scalar references be points themselves. This energetic and soulful collaboration invites a sustained meditation on a concrete-abstract sensuality that's as old as Lascaux. Fascia of the living- dead over the living- flexing.--Rodrigo Toscano
Remainders of one another and mimes in a house of mirrors, these poems by James Wagner and paintings by Nava Waxman interrogate the spaces and caesuras that mark the limits of perception within each art. Wagner's poems function within the parameters of ekphrasis, sometimes in the most literal, caption- esque, ways. But in only almost following the arc of Waxman's line as homage, in only almost dissolving language into marks and sounds, Wagner lets us hear, lets us read, the undulations between Wagner and Waxman, between his laconic, if abstract, ruminations and her minimalist, if lush, drawings and paintings.--Tyrone Williams
TRACES evokes a strange combination of aestheticism and atavism, a description of the world in phrasal units, like a creature traversing the seafloor, in nacreous kimono, steering by delicate eyespots. The future may be the past, 'blooms in black, ' and this its ecstatic, ekphrastic map.--Joyelle McSweeney
TRACES is a seamless and utterly engaging collaboration. Wagner and Waxman contribute a rare fluidity to each other's work. I keep rereading it, 'ghost by ghost.'--Michael Burkard
