From Eva Heisler’s book “Drawing Water”
Make black more precious than a rival’s crimson.
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What I learned from Goya’s black—
to light anti-clerical candles against black walls
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What I learned from Manet’s black—
to scrape the mirror’s back.
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What I learned from Matisse’s black—
to creep downstairs in the middle of the night and exchange blue silk for
black wool.
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What I learned from Reinhardt’s black—
that the black is not black but yellow and sometimes purple.
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What I learned from Dickinson’s black—
—
This selection comes from Eva Heisler’s book Drawing Water, available from Noctuary Press! Purchase your copy here!
Eva Heisler is a Maryland-born poet and art critic who lived in Iceland for many years and now resides in Germany. Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic (Kore Press, 2013) features a series of prose poems that explore failures of translation, the materiality of voice, and the relationship of language to perception. The book-length poem Drawing Water (Noctuary Press, 2013) meditates on line (conceptual line, descriptive line, expressive line, and found line) in an attempt to rethink the poetic line. Vocabulary Landscape, a work-in progress, explores the language of landscape description; an excerpt was recently published in Asymptote.
Leslie LaChance‘s poems have appeared in Quiddity, JMWW, the Best of the Net Anthology, Apple Valley Review, The Greensboro Review, Juked, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Slow Trains, Free Lunch, Chronogram, and Appalachian Journal. She also edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration. Her chapbook, How She Got That Way, appears in the quartet volume Mend & Hone from Toadlily Press.
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