Out of Speech - (Sea Cliff Fund) by Adam Vines (Paperback)

About the Book

"LSU Press Paperback Original"--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

Grounded in technical mastery, the poems in Out of Speech address issues both universal and timely. In this series of ekphrastic works, Adam Vines explores themes as varied as exile, family, disease, desire, and isolation through an array of twentieth- and twenty-first century painters, including Picasso, Hopper, Rothko, de Kooning, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Artschwager. He also goes within and beyond these works of art to explore characters set in the present-day museums, from a bored docent to a misinformed "explainer" of an artwork's meaning. Combining these two views--one that looks at the painting and another that looks around it--his poems affirm the artist's insights into the complexity of being human.

Review Quotes

Adam Vines' Out of Speech will be the benchmark for contemporary ekphrastic poetry for some time to come. Dazzling tropological shifts allow us to experience an artist's mind caught up in the imagination of other artists, digesting them with humor, sensorial intensity, and depth. The paintings and poems emerge from each other and back in transparent tidal shifts of the mind. The sheer velocity of Vines' acute perceptions--in a flood of original tropes--underscores the collection's philosophical focus: temporality. To quote Vines, 'Always time stretched to its limit.'--Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Bypassing the tired alleged border between 'art' and 'life', Adam Vines rushes headlong into the conditional 'perhaps, ' where imagination enters narrative time, and the moment of a painting's portrayal is newly understood beyond the merely representational as suddenly present and alive. With frank urgency and a relentlessly accurate eye, Adam Vines takes us through the ekphrastic mode on this wildly inventive pilgrimage. Here are poems that persuade by way of metaphoric leaps and overlaps, verbs harnessed to verbal acuity, the suspended sentence, and the startlingly blunt discovery. Again and again, Vines turns description into ritualistic act in these remarkably candid sacraments of soul. Out of Speech is a world whose attentions are astonishing.--Pimone Triplett

In Out of Speech, visual sensation pushes language beyond its common music and familiar couplings into what Stevens termed 'ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.' This is a brilliant and deeply satisfying book.--David Yezzi

About the Author

Adam Vines is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and editor of Birmingham Poetry Review. He is also the author of The Coal Life and coauthor of Day Kink and According to Discretion.