Weston’s Unsent Letters to Modotti

by Chad Parmenter

$12.95

Snowbound Chapbook Award, chosen by Kathleen Jesme


“Weston’s Unsent Letters to Modotti inhabits the fluid space between history and imagination,” says Kathleen Jesme. “Parmenter’s extended persona poem deftly investigates the named but uncommunicated, that which is unfinished, unsent, unlived. Weston exists only as an eye behind the photographic lens, and is unable to fully inhabit the rest of the world, or to send the letters he writes to his sometime model and lover.”

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  • Description

  • ”Weston’s Unsent Letters to Modotti inhabits the fluid space between history and imagination,” says Kathleen Jesme. “Parmenter’s extended persona poem deftly investigates the named but uncommunicated, that which is unfinished, unsent, unlived. Weston exists only as an eye behind the photographic lens, and is unable to fully inhabit the rest of the world, or to send the letters he writes to his sometime model and lover.”

    ISBN: 9781936797677
    Published November 2015

  • About The Author

  • Chad Parmenter is the author of another innovative chapbook, Bat & Man: A Sonnet Comic Book (Finishing Line, 2012). He has recently had poems published in Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and Hotel Amerika. He earned his MFA at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and a PhD at the University of Missouri, and he now lives near Niagara Falls.

  • Critics' Reviews

  • “In Weston’s Unsent Letters to Modotti, Chad Parmenter has re-created an intimate, intellectually invigorating relationship between photographer Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, his lover, fellow artist, and frequent subject. But there’s much more to this collection than the resurrection of a long-ago romance between two complex, at times politically revolutionary, characters. Rather, in the voice of Weston, Parmenter examines the ethics of portraiture, the difficulties of artistic objectification, the intersection of the political and the aesthetic, and the impossibility of truly knowing the mind of another. With these intricate and thoughtful poems, Chad Parmenter shows himself to be a poet of lyrical intensity, intelligence, and psychological perception. This is a marvelous book. ” –Kevin Prufer

    “What’s more evocative than an unsent letter? An untaken photograph. Readers familiar with Chad Parmenter’s pop-smart Batman poems may be surprised at the lyric inwardness of these epistolary meditations, which imagine Edward Weston’s fixation with his old lover, photographer Tina Modotti. Yet Parmenter’s Batman and his Weston have a logical connection: Batman is a secret lover haunted by the dark-comic tensions of Eros; Weston is a camera-superhero troubled by memories of the woman whose artistry matched his own. In this intense sequence, Weston’s waxing desire for the Modotti who escaped him becomes a metaphor for the poet’s own language searching for appropriate form.” –Penelope Pelizzon

  • Excerpts

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  • Weight

  • No information is available.

  • Dimensions

  • 6 x 9 in

  • Awards

  • Snowbound Chapbook Award, chosen by Kathleen Jesme
”Weston’s Unsent Letters to Modotti inhabits the fluid space between history and imagination,” says Kathleen Jesme. “Parmenter’s extended persona poem deftly investigates the named but uncommunicated, that which is unfinished, unsent, unlived. Weston exists only as an eye behind the photographic lens, and is unable to fully inhabit the rest of the world, or to send the letters he writes to his sometime model and lover.”

ISBN: 9781936797677
Published November 2015

Chad Parmenter is the author of another innovative chapbook, Bat & Man: A Sonnet Comic Book (Finishing Line, 2012). He has recently had poems published in Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and Hotel Amerika. He earned his MFA at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and a PhD at the University of Missouri, and he now lives near Niagara Falls.

“In Weston’s Unsent Letters to Modotti, Chad Parmenter has re-created an intimate, intellectually invigorating relationship between photographer Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, his lover, fellow artist, and frequent subject. But there’s much more to this collection than the resurrection of a long-ago romance between two complex, at times politically revolutionary, characters. Rather, in the voice of Weston, Parmenter examines the ethics of portraiture, the difficulties of artistic objectification, the intersection of the political and the aesthetic, and the impossibility of truly knowing the mind of another. With these intricate and thoughtful poems, Chad Parmenter shows himself to be a poet of lyrical intensity, intelligence, and psychological perception. This is a marvelous book. ” –Kevin Prufer

“What’s more evocative than an unsent letter? An untaken photograph. Readers familiar with Chad Parmenter’s pop-smart Batman poems may be surprised at the lyric inwardness of these epistolary meditations, which imagine Edward Weston’s fixation with his old lover, photographer Tina Modotti. Yet Parmenter’s Batman and his Weston have a logical connection: Batman is a secret lover haunted by the dark-comic tensions of Eros; Weston is a camera-superhero troubled by memories of the woman whose artistry matched his own. In this intense sequence, Weston’s waxing desire for the Modotti who escaped him becomes a metaphor for the poet’s own language searching for appropriate form.” –Penelope Pelizzon

No information is available.
No information is available.
6 x 9 in
Snowbound Chapbook Award, chosen by Kathleen Jesme