Books

Pictures in the Firestorm is wide in scope, luminous in detail, and elegant in craft. Lauren Rusk’s mastery of nuance and tone allows her to write with equal grace about 1960s San Francisco and about the enduring challenge and grief of a Holocaust museum. Her poems range from evocative glimpses of the momentary to complex meditations on art and its relationship to the world. Rusk’s passion for visual art includes the sometimes difficult history of its making; her subtle wit and intelligence move in and out of the frame, always with one eye on the world outside the gallery, where too often conditions of injustice and violence prevail. Lauren Rusk does not see an opposition between art and social concerns, but embraces them both. The result is a book of poems at once fluid and urgent—an impressive achievement, and in these days, especially, a crucial one.     — Betsy Sholl, former Poet Laureate of Maine, author of Otherwise Unseeable, Rough Cradle, Late Psalm, and other collections

When joy allies itself with the sort of uncompromisingly accurate descriptions found in Lauren Rusk’s Pictures in the Firestorm, the result is an immensely readable poetry, irrepressible in feeling and unoppressible in spirit. This exceptional first book takes nothing less than wholeness from intelligence. Its speaker is always game, sometimes grave, sometimes blissful, and even in the midst of our dark history ever ready for “this journey to encounter . . . multitudes, belongings.”     — William Olsen, author of Sand Theory, Avenue of Vanishing, Trouble Lights, and other collections

As Lauren Rusk’s carefully wrought poems let us know, “Stories last in the dust.” Here is a poet whose attention to the world seems amply rewarded by a language so graceful it practically glows. Rusk stands at the curious junctures of ancient tales at the very moments they’re matriculating into 21st century passions, pastimes, and resonant regrets. Rusk’s poems are made all the bolder, clearer, and dearer by how much of the bold, the clear, and the dear she allows in.     — Nance Van Winckel, author of Pacific Walkers, No Starling, Beside Ourselves, and other collections

Art saves lives, we say. Yes and no: nothing rescued the children of Terezín, though the drawings they left behind preserve something of their inventive play, their hopes, terror and questions. Lauren Rusk is an extraordinary observer; she brings to these artifacts a profound ability to discern in marks on a page the human complexity of the ones who made them. The great majority of these children went up in smoke in the absolute moral zero of the chimney stacks. But we can bear witness to them, still, in the precise, empathic and beautiful interventions of a poet who knows that what she can save is sometimes all we have, and never enough.     — Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (National Book Award Winner), Deep Lane, and other collections

Lauren Rusk resurrects the imaginations of children whose inner lives shine through contraband paper and color in artworks found when the labor camp Theresienstadt was liberated. She manages to re-create the works themselves, which often reflect a Chagall-like combination of lyricism and dissociation, and also to bring the children to life in their moments of vision and their persistent, subversive reach for beauty. Rusk serves as their transparent medium, selective and convincing, in this gem of a collection.     — Leslie Ullman, author of Progress on the Subject of Immensity (poems), Library of Small Happiness (essays), and other collections