Tension : Rupture

“Tension : Rupture is a brilliant shapeshifting book that repurposes the ekphrasis as a mode of enquiry. Cutter Streeby’s engagement with Michael Haight’s ephemeral works, Alcoholic Crepuscules, offers us vivid painterly poems often laced with the surreal. There’s an alchemy of sorts, a reaching into and melding into Haight’s de-stabilizing work. Both artists operate in a zone of intensity that offers a reader different levels of immersion and experience.”

—Mona Arshi

“Isolated from my friends due to the global pandemic, I’m ravenous for good conversations. Tension : Rupture arrived just in time. The conversation between Michael Haight and Cutter Streeby is enthralling, bright with human excess and intimacies. Streeby’s poems trouble into speech the tender and volatile flesh in Haight’s art, and the color in Haight’s art is lyrical, transcendent. Each painting, each poem filled ‘my living room with burning stars.’”

—Eduardo Corral

“In Tension : Rupture, Cutter Streeby navigates desire and poesis with language as a taut and slippery lifeline in poems complemented and complicated by Michael Haight’s hallucinatory vignettes veering from bacchanal to disaster and back again. Though tonally elegiac, Streeby’s poems trouble easy divisions between past and present, asking what memories still keep making us in their wakes and our awakenings. Streeby traverses time and tongues, eschewing a monolithic origin story and crafting a dazzling mosaic of originary moments instead.”

—Dora Malech

“Ekphrasis has many faces. Re-enactments in one medium of a work in another can grow tedious. The true process involves touching base, understanding that base, then dancing down a course beginning in that understanding. That is the course followed by the collaboration between artist Michael Haight and poet Cutter Streeby. Here the artist’s mostly water color suggestions of flesh and circumstance taken from a series titled Alcoholic Crepuscules prompt poems, prose, and adventures across various fields, essentially thematic but rushing off into associated imagery. It makes for an exciting set of collisions as much as collaborations. There are doors constantly opening onto potentially fierce landscapes the reader senses before being propelled onward.”

—George Szirtes

“In this beautiful collaboration Tension : Rupture the bright architectures of bodies are ablaze on both canvas and page. Haight’s vibrant colors complement the energy of Streeby’s lines, and the union confronts the rending of intimacy with a rendering of it. Here among the heliotropes and blood halos, ‘language is a conspiracy between two people.’ Figure and syllabary create a dialogue across this book, giving a name to each feeling and a voice to every fire.”

—Traci Brimhall

“Everything about this book is extra-ordinary.  From creation to publication, which, in many senses is a frozen moment in an ongoing conversation. It is critical to understanding this work that both artists are equally acknowledged and considered, even as they express their responses to the world and each other in the different languages of words and paint. … It is important to ‘experience’ this book, not just read it, both as an artifact of the ongoing conversation and as a combined work of art in two languages.”

Aline Soules, Matter Monthly