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Kristin Prevallet |
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An explosive and exploratory chapbook, this
work leads the reader into a landscape of modern and ancient news stories,
and reveals the meaning of present-day chaos. About this chapbook, Mark
Wallace writes: "Kristin details exactly what happens when human beings
take off blithely for the sun; they experience intense heat, destructive
fallout, and the debris of deluded Lead, Glass and Poppy are the materials used
in Anselm Keifer's "Angel of History," a gigantic lead bomber
plane sculpture, abandoned and corroding, with dead poppies growing out
of its shafts, cockpit and wings. Fallen from space and landing in one
of Keifer's canvas fields, burnt with the dark colors of destruction,
fire, abandonment, loss, is where I imagine the coordinates of this fallen
angel, but its true location is the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
An angel, flying backwards into the future while facing the past is the
now widely applied theoretical articulation of history as envisioned by
Walter Benjamin -- and Keifer's expansion of the metaphor of an angel
into an airplane takes history out of its mystical-density realm and into
the tangibility of debris, where what is left crashed on earth after the
destructive angel passes are the materials (lead, glass, poppy) that an
explosive history has left behind. |