Work by Thomas Hart Benton/
UPCOMING ON SNOWFLAKES IN A BLIZZARD, JUNE 18-24
“SCENES FROM THE HEARTLANDS,” BY DONNA BAIER STEIN.
When a contemporary writer turns her imagination loose inside the images of an iconic artist of the past, the result is storytelling magic at its best. Here are nine tales that bring to vivid life the early decades of the 20th century as witnessed by one of America’s most well-known painters. Thomas Hart Benton sketched fiddlers and farm wives, preachers and soldiers, folks gathering in dance halls and tent meetings. Though his lithographs depict the past, the real-life people he portrayed face issues that are front and center today: corruption, women’s rights, racial inequality.
In these stories we enter the imagined lives of Midwesterners in the late 1930s and early 1940s. A mysterious woman dancing to fiddle music makes one small gesture of kindness that helps heal the rift of racial tensions in her small town. A man leaves his childhood home after a tragic accident and becomes involved with the big-time gamblers who have made Hot Springs, Arkansas, their summer playground. After watching her mother being sent to an insane asylum simply for grieving over a miscarriage, a girl determines to never let any man have any say over her body.
Then as now, Americans have struggled with poverty, illness, and betrayal. These fictions reveal our fellow countrymen and women living with grace and strong leanings toward virtue, despite the troubles that face them.
“CHRONICLES OF COSMIC CHAOS: IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION,” BY SOPHIA FALCO.
Writes one reviewer: “Within the ‘Chaos,’ control and contradiction define Sophia Falco’s newest volume of poems. This mature work showcases her deliberate craft as she coaxes memories and impressions into poetic form, allowing each emotion to dictate shape and style, affirming, ‘\yes, a method / to this madness’ in a ‘World Backwards.’ This surprising variety captures and mimics the complexity of our thoughts and the intimate relationships that are at the heart of this work–the expectations, longing, disappointments, and reverence–the very pulse of humanity in all of its delight and pain. On full display is her characteristic marriage of opposites. Childlike fantasy colors the grips of despair. Hope refuses to be drowned. And as we enter the fourth dimension with her, time is suspended, allowing us to hold up and examine more than one ‘blue green marble’ that is “more than just a marble’ and see ‘that light exists.’”
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 