camera obscura by erica lewis

erica lewis’s camera obscura is a stunning meditation on the relationship between things in the world and our perception of them. Beginning with a photograph “that made me think about how time and the constant mutability of everything is . . . the underlying story of all the stories we write,” her words show us – indeed literally see – how “the object exists outside us without our taking part in it”; how “to bring the picture into focus”; how “an image sparks another image”; indeed, how (in an eyeblink) “to trap the image between frames,” so that when “memory stands up in slow motion” there will somehow be “no ideas only surfaces, no surfaces only words, no words only textures, no textures only/ contingent connections.” Everyone who cares about the physics of perception in words will want to read this book.

—Stephen Ratcliffe

erica lewis uses the shifts and variables of perception as both an aesthetic and as a starting point for an exploration of the nature of individual responsibility in this world. /camera obscura /is a meditative philosophical poem. And yet at the same time it is also interestingly a very personal poem, one about the intimacy between artist and writer-viewer. And more than anything, it is beautiful, moving, richly complicating.

—Juliana Spahr

If the image under reproduction is responsible for the draining of the sacred from experience, and the poem like everything under capital is always already compromised by the systems from which it seeks exemption, where are we to find love—that tender once-freight of lyric and figuration? With camera obscura, lewis and finein perform an array of insides and outsides, an experiment in public intimacy and private adumbration. Enclosures of various scale flicker at the edges of this collection—churches, beating chests, a blinkered eye—but always with their implication of such empty space as active. Like the image-cache (finein’s prints and etchings) that sparked this project, it’s a privacy broken open to reveal the lines of intersection. Neither ekphrastic nor illustrative, here a lover’s former life is over-written as text transects the frames. But as with light and other optic residues this text collects, we find insistent parallels, like separate lines of sight: “…how can anyone enter into / my dreams my instincts my desires / my thoughts which have taken a long time to mature…” In incantatory blocks of prose and incisive jagged lines that toggle in contrast with the blazing images they interrupt, the question becomes not how to love, but how “to surrender to one another,” to allow “seeing as seeing” become “seeing // the image for what it is.” If, as Levinas suggests, “the pathos of the erotic relationship is the fact of being two,” then from our secular perdition to each other this lyric rumination rescues “an austere and blazing poetry / of the real…”

— Andrew Rippeon

Mark Stephen Finein earned his BFA in Printmaking from State University College Buffalo. Over the years, his creative focus has shifted to include music composition and performance. A few years of world travel led him to San Francisco where he’s been since 1994. He has never stopped doing artwork, however, and has recently reinvigorated his work by eschewing the limiting nature of representationalism for pure abstraction, while adhering to his vitalistic foundations. In addition to camera obscura, book projects include the precipice of jupiter (collaboration with poet erica lewis, Queue books); his work can also be seen in Little Red Leaves and Boog City, among others.

erica lewis is a fine arts publicist in San Francisco, where she curated the Canessa Gallery Reading Series. her work has appeared or is forthcoming in P-Queue, New American Writing, Little Red Leaves, Parthenon West Review, Ur Vox, Shampoo, Cricket Online Review, alice blue, BOOG CITY, Word For/Word, Work, and Try, among others. in addition to camera obscura, collaborations with artist Mark Stephen Finein include the chapbook excerpts from camera obscura (Etherdome Press) and full-length book project the precipice of jupiter (Queue Books).

Book Information:

· Paperback: 116 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-193540-293-0

$16