Overview

In Dime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic reflects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America's great artists. Simic's spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for which Cornell is justly renowned.

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9781590171707

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Dime-Store Alchemy . . . is the most sustained literary response this <br>far to Cornell's boxes, montages, and films . . . Incisive, <br>freewheeling, dramatic?a mixture of evocation and observation, as lucid <br>and shadowy as the imagination it celebrates . . . Dime-Store Alchemy <br>is a meeting of kindred spirits that is itself a work of art. --Edward <br>Hirsch, The New Yorker <br> Dime-Store Alchemy is a collection of crystalline paragraphs, of <br>irreplaceable miniatures, it is an act of homage, an ideal commentary, <br>suffused with the peculiar charm, the oneiric energy of its subject, it <br>is pure illumination, Simic at his very best. --Mark Strand <br> A beautiful book that evokes Cornell's artistic spirit. -- Harper's <br>Bazaar <br> It's hard to do justice to the charm and power of Joseph Cornell's <br>boxes. His reliance on collage, indifference to technical display, and <br>Surrealist mining of private obsession make him very much a modern <br>artist, yet his work also brings to mind bourgeois parlors, the tidy <br>vitrines of collectors, and the odds and ends children carry around for <br>comfort and distraction. It is an art at once hermetic and <br>matter-of-fact, sophisticated and simple. Appropriately, this study is <br>neither a straightforward critical account of Cornell's art nor a <br>merely literary embellishment of it, but rather a parallel text: <br>written by Simic ( Hotel Insomnia ), one of our best poets, it includes <br>his own poems and reminiscences, as well as quotations from a variety <br>of other writers. Simic mingles biography and critical discussion with <br>selections of writings from the artist's notebooks. The book emerges as <br>a piece of writing constructed along the enigmatic lines of Cornell's <br>art. And that art, as Simic sees it, gathers from the scattered pieces <br>of the American past a new, redeeming reality; at heart, this art is a <br>religious practice. Only seemingly random, Simic's approach develops <br>both the plain detail of Cornell's life and illuminates the nature of <br>his work. - -Publisher's Weekly

Author Information

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist and translator. He has published twenty collections of his own poetry, five books of essays, a memoir, and numerous of books of translations. He has received many literary awards for his poems and his translations, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship. Voice at 3 A.M., his selected later and new poems, was published in 2003 and a new book of poems My Noiseless Entourage came out in the spring of 2005.

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