by Lauren Camp
Award-winning poet Lauren Camp's sixth collection of poetry.
With the gifts of a visual artist and poet's attention, An Eye in Each Square confronts our era's barbed and shifting networks of power and atrocities. Lauren Camp's sixth collection of poetry offers social critique within an imaginative biography of enigmatic painter Agnes Martin and a treatise on the multiplicities of the natural world. Rendering its landscape in precise imagery and lyrical language, An Eye in Each Square asks the reader to hold the conscience of the world and also to claim what we might need most--the risky and urgent space of comfort found within the artist's line.
"The paintings and mind of artist Agnes Martin echo through the very structure of these poems. In fact, Martin is the book's structure. She is a form like a sonnet is a form. ... Ekphrasis is no contrivance. It is a cosmology. These poems are 'slow and persuasive.' They move like the sea, mirror the stillness of the sky, mapping and refining a deep interiority. Agnes Martin's visual work is composed of verticals and horizontals, and Camp finds their parallel in poetry's unit of measure, the line, a line that is a question providing its own answer." —Diane Seuss
"These poems shine with the crystalline austerity of an Agnes Martin painting, sparkling with precise imagery, crisp word choices, and surprising swerves of syntax. The whole braids personal exploration with a deep appreciation, not only of Martin's work, but also of her unusual participation in the land around her. These poems, similarly, become a part of the landscape in an alchemical feat that brings the reader into its very heart." —Cole Swenson
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Lauren Camp is the author of five previous books of poetry, including Took House (Tupelo Press, 2020), which won the American Fiction Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award and the Southwest Book Design & Production Award. Her book One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016) won a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and Housatonic Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, Massachusetts Review, and Poet Lore; her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. She is a senior fellow for Black Earth Institute and was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park in 2022. She is the Poet Laureate of New Mexico.
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