This full-color catalog offers a selection of Michael Brophy's recent oil paintings with an essay by Charles D'Ambrosio. "Most of Brophy's landscapes are obviously wrecked, but there's no nostalgia for the olden days, no melancholy, no sappy loss, largely because there's also no initial shock. Ruin is painted as if it were eternal, as if there were nothing to recover, as if beauty persists, generous and spacious, even when the landscape of our longing does not. Looking at his paintings you don't get to pull out your wisdom or wistful regret or revisionist insights or any of the other consolations people apply as a patch to the broken world. You don't get to stand back, hoping for a better view. His work holds us in place, keeps us motionless, transfixed by an arrangement of harmonies that don't add up, that offer an artistic calm but no ethical or social way out." ~ Charles D'Ambrosio

Paintings

Reference

Brophy, Michael

Catalogs & Directories

Clear Cut Press

Cultural Writing. This collection of fiction, poetry and essays from the new Clear Cut Press, compiles the work of writers Clear Cut Press has or plans to publish, providing a map of their direction and vision for the future. The book is "portable and durable. If you leave the area it will still be useful. There are many other places like this one. The book might help you recognize them. The future has preoccupations and it has trajectories. The book maps these conditions... Some possibilities will blossom as others collapse. The language of the future is more beautiful than we know"--from the inside flap.

The Clear Cut Future

Literature & Fiction

United States

Poetry. "Ode to certain interstates," the thirteen-part poem of this collection, was inspired by the year poet Howard W. Robertson worked as a long-haul truck driver in the American West and British Columbia. In between pauses at truck stops and rest areas, the author meditates on (among other matters) Kant, the Kalapuyans, Basho, and the "best buffet in the West." The eight additional poems in the book, such as "Ode to this small stick" and "The transcendental laughter of Eleanor," use a refined intelligence to probe the daily intersections of the sacred and banal. Howard W. Robertson is a retired research librarian. In 2003, he was awarded the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry.

Ode to Certain Interstates and Other Poems

Robertson, Howard W.

Poetry

Fiction. Gay and Lesbian Studies. The stories in DENNY SMITH use events in the life of Robert Gluck as a ground for the expansion of empathy and intellect. These events include burglary, sex, conversation, reading, humiliation, child raising, and porn. Gluck's previous books include MARGERY KEMPE and JACK THE MODERNIST, both newly available from SPD. "Flaubert says in a letter to Louise Colet that good prose should be stuffed with things. This is good prose indeed, filled with shells and duck meat and sunlight and flesh and gardening tools and sperm..."--Samuel R. Delany.

Denny Smith (Stories)

Glück, Robert

History & Criticism

Core Sample: Portland Art Now

Stadler, Matthew

Gragg, Randy

Cultural Writing. Poetry. Essays. THE BACK ROOM is an occasional series of presentations/symposia/bacchanals in Portland, Oregon, replete with food, drink, music, and general boisterousness garlanding the central pleasure of bright intellects voicing their excellent texts, winging it in conversation, and screening or presenting various textual and visual delights. Including work by Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Moira Roth, Lisa Robertson, and many more. This collection is meant to inspire and inform copycat efforts in other cities.

The Back Room: An Anthology

Contemporary

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Books by Clear Cut Press