Alan Sonfist: American Earth Landscape

By Norman L Kleeblatt

NOV 2021 | ArtSeen

When you google “land art” one of the top options features two photographic examples: Robert Smithson’s monumental Spiral Jetty (1970), perhaps the paradigm for the genre, and Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape (1978). Smithson’s earthwork is a massive and muscular transformation of terrain set in the vast open area of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Its image is quickly identifiable, iconic. Time Landscape is modest, non-iconic, and set in the heart of an urban metropolis.

Beth Nguyen’s Owner of a Lonely Heart

By Mai Tran

JULY/AUG 2023 | Books

Beth Nguyen’s second memoir, Owner of a Lonely Heart, revolves around a story that is still “uncomfortably dramatic” for her to tell in real life. When Nguyen’s family flees Saigon a day before the war in Vietnam ended, Nguyen’s mother stays, or is left, behind. In the aftermath, Nguyen spends the eighties growing up in a mostly white town in Michigan, where her given name Bich, and her multigenerational household that consisted of family members both biological and not, were unconventional for the area. Safety is found in silence, in not provoking her father’s anger or longing for people and places she cannot remember.

James Reich with D. Harlan Wilson

SEPT 2023 | Books

Since 2013, I have been the editor-in-chief for Anti-Oedipus Press. James’s first novel, I, Judas, left an indelible impression on me. After reading it in 2014, maybe 2015, I must have reached out to him with a compliment and an invitation to submit a book to AOP. We got along at once, and he sent me his novel Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness. I love Conrad, and I loved what James did with Heart of Darkness, (re)viewing it through the sieve of his own unique voice, purview, and Word Horde.

Robert Motherwell Illustrating Poetry

By Heidi Colsman-Freyberger

FEB 2023 | Critics Page

In his eulogy for Robert Motherwell the English critic Bryan Robertson remarked, “No other artist in this century could have been quite so much in love with literature, and, above all, poetry.”