Rayfish by Mary Hickman adopts and synthesizes the genre conventions of lyric poetry, nonfiction, and criticism, and extends the possibilities of each. Hickman's prose poems weave art and the body into the viscera of experience.
Publishers Weekly (1/1/2016 12:00:00 AM) Hickman (This Is the Homeland) fluidly melds poetry and prose in a collection crafted with an ... Read moreessayist's narrative certainty and a poet's dreamlike images and nonlinear sense of time. Though many of the James Laughlin Award-winning collection's poems find their starting points in art, they go beyond the ekphrastic, blending together the writer's response to a given work as well as biographical details and interviews about the piece and its artist.
Publishers Weekly (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM) In Mary Hickman's Rayfish, the body is both indescribable and described, both inescapable and mortal: Soutine attempts to keep the color of his first carcasses fresh with buckets of blood, but also Anna is high in the air, higher than most men can leap. Her right knee folds beneath her even as her left thigh, ankle, and toes extend, pressed behind into darkness. In these poems
essays? but if they are essays, they're the most musical, and most poetically focused, essays I've ever read
the body is the source of the world in which the body suffers. And in this way, Rayfish ultimately tells a necessary story of America right now, an America attempting to overcome its hatred of the many different bodies of which it is made.
Shane McCrae, author of In the Language of My Captor Publishers Weekly (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM) As a painter, I am utterly grateful for this book. To read these deceptively intimate texts is to learn how materials mean: a skin exchange with death, under fluorescent lights, in sterile conditions. In this encounter, touch heals and fouls; to look is to violate. We art-makers need language for process, for self-critique, for the thrilling backbend that is still at stake in the postmortem of Formalism or Process-Based art or Institutional Critique. What are we doing in our studios? Hickman folds multiple voices, of critic, maker, and maybe the ancient Greek chorus, into the bulky warm shame of morphing: fish/human/insect/image. Her refusal to mystify, and her profound intelligence, are reasons to praise, to sing praise, to shout praise.
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, painter Publishers Weekly (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM) Show Less