Moving between sculpture, video, theater and drawing, New York–based artist Marianne Vitale (born 1973) cultivates an aesthetic of absurdity. This first monograph highlights reclaimed lumber sculptures that recall tombstones, outhouses and burned bridges, evoking the early American frontier days.

Marianne Vitale: What I Need to Do Is Lighten the Fuck Up About a Lot of Shit

Arts & Photography

Beasley, Mark

Colby, Todd

Elmes, Linus

Individual Artists

Zach Feuer Gallery/Ibid Projects/UKS

Poetry. An extended love letter, Todd Colby's sixth collection SPLASH STATE is filled with humor and charm. These poems are as concerned with aging, time, being, and death as they are with eliminating "the need for anxious circumstances" with facts, instructions, and advice. From extolling the uses of "Shark's Paw" and "Fink Leaf" to "how to look like everything is okay in photographs," Colby's poems opt for the personal and generous, even when his tongue is firmly planted in cheek. If melancholy is just around the corner, these poems will walk with you in the opposite direction. "Todd Colby's poetry radiates the joy of receiving a long-awaited letter. He ends an early poem, 'Sweetie,' with the line 'Let me let me know let me know soon let me know soon Sweetie.' It now seems that Sweetie has replied. In his new collection, SPLASH STATE, he tells us 'You will no longer need a hushed, barely audible tone / to confess your inadequacies because you will no longer have any / to confess'—the ideal state that Auden hoped would 'make us well / without confession of the ill.' With this pleasure comes responsibility, but it's the responsibility to remain in joy.' There won't be a need / for codes or inane principles, because you'll always / be too radiant and purposeful for that.' In SPLASH STATE, a perfect title for the state of calm eagerness he writes out of, Colby discovers that 'There are mornings, and then there are / golden glimpses of something totally / amazing like awe or coffee,' and then that 'Morning will never be called off / due to budgetary constraints, or even heartbreak. / By afternoon, there will be plush green pillows, / strewn on the lawn waiting for my body. / I can hardly wait.' The rest of us no longer have to wait. This dazzling collection confirms Colby's status as one of the finest and funniest poets of his generation."—John Ashbery "I read Todd Colby's SPLASH STATE and I'm here to say that it makes the world better. I mean this because this is a monumental book and in this book, in this stack of love poems, we see that the Romantic has a place again in the everyday, like the 'courtyard' that 'sparkles puppy yellow' with sunlight, the 'Simple Times' when 'bones softened the cars,' and an I that 'blooms out over Brooklyn' are all part of what we do this whole thing for: life. If you like Frank O'Hara, Eileen Myles, John Ashbery, William Blake, and Wallace Stevens, then you are going to like this book. Or I mean to say, that this book is a spell, a love spell. And if you want a book to carry with you when no one seems to care, when no one seems to be your friend, well then, you've found it, it's this book, this book is your love spell, this book is your friend."—Dorothea Lasky

Splash State

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

The Song Cave

The best of Todd Colby's Soft Skull poetry collections Ripsnort and Cush are here with new poetry and prose. This is simultaneously a Best Of and a launching into new directions for this intensely high-energy poet. He is a spontaneous, lively performer, the sharpest, funniest poetic voice under 35. Mr. Colby makes serious sport of language, showing its basis in the body's impulses and its mutable meanings, explained Ann Powers in the New York Times.

Riot in the Charm Factory

Dramas & Plays

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Colby's Tremble and Shine is the first full-length collection since his new and selected Riot in the Charm Factory. Tremble &amp; Shine moves from poem to fiction to reportage, from the grinning skull of Poe to Lenny Bruce’s adenoids to a rhythm of repetition that is entirely Colby you break it down and repeat and re-form till it’s like this dance that can’t stop, this cementmixer you cannot escape from, the eternal pound. The anger that drives the world is Todd Colby’s poetry. The tension of the murderous performer vs. the tightly packed poetic form is a spiritual thing. In Todd’s whirling art spasms, God herself is actually being created, visioned, and visited. Todd’s poems, blasphemous and heinous and pus-filled and covered with mugwort and lysergic acid as they are, are all prayers. One of Soft Skull's original poets comes through with a collection of lyrical and awe-inspiring poems, and addresses everything from the acid-trip qualities of outdoor camping to the need to righteously rock, against all odds.

Tremble and Shine

Soft Skull

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Books by Colby, Todd