“Schwabsky’s adept and thoughtful lyrics twin the vagaries of love with the complexities of art, treating both as part of the same tangled interplay of surface, perspective, “self-portrayal,” and the erotically charged balance of power between observer and observed: “Notice the way I notice you.” The “you” that moves through the poems never quite resolves into an object, but gives occasion for the poet’s “crossing over into myself/in breath stained with images”: stars to blank pages, skies to “a child’s tooth.” If “the object of any and every couple/becomes mere music,” Schwabsky’s poems lend it a plausible clef.” -Goodreads
“Schwabsky’s adept and thoughtful lyrics twin the vagaries of love with the complexities of art, treating both as part of the same tangled interplay of surface, perspective, “self-portrayal,” and the erotically charged balance of power between observer and observed: “Notice the way I notice you.” The “you” that moves through the poems never quite resolves into an object, but gives occasion for the poet’s “crossing over into myself/in breath stained with images”: stars to blank pages, skies to “a child’s tooth.” If “the object of any and every couple/becomes mere music,” Schwabsky’s poems lend it a plausible clef.” -Goodreads
Barry Schwabsky is an American poet and the art critic for The Nation. His recent books include Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square Editions, 2015), The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2017), Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2018), and Landscape Painting Now (DAP, 2019). He lives in New York.
