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Open Books: Events
March 10, 2010 07:30 PM
MACGREGOR CARD & BRANDON DOWNING
Macgregor Card’s poetry collection Duties of an English Foreign Secretary ($16) was chosen for the 2009 Fence Modern Poets Series by Martin Corless-Smith, who wrote that Mr. Card’s "tragic-comic choruses half recall a nursery rhyme, at once capricious and wise." They do make for a topsy-turvy world, at once playful and sinister, with repetition, rhythm, and occasional rhyme pulling their reader up the road and through the hedgerow -- "Each human to its oily violet shed / So join me in my scarlet modest house / In the playroom it’s so cold today / For I am ready Yes you may."
Few authors thank a flea market and X-Acto blades for help in the production of their work. But Brandon Downing does in his full-color, oversize collection of crisply reproduced text-collages, Lake Antiquity ($40 Fence). Drawing from many sources (stock certificates, Victorian engravings, diagrams of trees, Popular Mechanics), he has created an art-poetry that pulses with both clarity and cacophony -- "He was a strange flower upon the old painting, / like a little spider hanging in the great space."
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