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Poetry. Photographs by Charlee Brodsky. Jim Daniels' poems in conversation with Charlee Brodsky's photographs make for a remarkable collective work...The poems mirror the pictures' cool balance. Sardonic, smart, wily, tough, they are stories for each image...what the eye of the poet surmises from what the eye of the camera sets down --Alan Trachtenberg.

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9780933087941

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Jim Daniels poems and Charlee Brodskys photographs offer a collaborative rumination on urban life. The photos use a variety of techniques to reveal the personalities of the people pictured, and the poems add smart, funny stories and voices invented by Daniels. The book documents everyday life in poignant and engaging ways. - Working-Class Notes <br>---------- <br>Pittsburgh Tribune Review: <br>Many poets tend to work from the interior outward, casting emotions and feelings into shapes via words. <br>Photographers almost always work by reacting to visual cues. <br>It would seem that the two disciplines might clash and be at opposing purposes, but Charlee Brodsky, who teaches photography at Carnegie Mellon University, felt that poet and writer Jim Daniels, who teaches creative writing at Carnegie Mellon, shared some of her photographic tendencies. <br> One of the things I noticed about Jim early on was that he was very, very sensitive to visual things, Brodsky says. <br>The pair collaborated on Street, which features Brodsky's photographs, juxtaposed with poems by Daniels. <br> I think we were destined to meet because he did stuff with poetry, with words, that I was doing with images, she says. <br>One of the things the duo has in common is an affinity for the working class as a subject. Daniels has explored the lives and mentalities of laborers and hourly wage earners in his poetry collections, including M-80, and Detroit Tales, a short-story collection. Brodsky collaborated with writer Judith Mitchell on A Town Without Steel: EnvisioningHomestead. <br>In Street, their sensibilities found common ground via photographs Brodsky took in the 1980s of people in Pittsburgh neighborhoods. There are shots of people in front of stores, row houses and other cityscapes, but there are also disembodied photos of torsos and feet. <p><br> One of the things that's interesting about Charlee's photographs is the subtlety of them and how the more you look at them you start to notice little things that make the person more intriguing, or maybe reveal something about them that, on first glance, you might not notice or think about, Daniels says. <br>It was Daniels' knack for finding such details that made the project a success, Brodsky believes. <br> Previous to Jim supplying the stories that go with the photographs, it would be up to you, the viewer, to complete those photographs with your own associations, she says. Viewers can now take 'Street' into their own world and complete whatever kind of little neighborhood they want with this. It is a street in someone's life where all this stuff happens. <br>-Regis Behe, Pittsburgh TRIBUNE-REVIEW Sunday, November 27, 2005

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