About the Book
The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing is a powerful collection of new poems by the Kansas poet Robert L. Dean Jr. Inspired by the paintings of Chicago artist Steven Schroeder, Dean composes poems and flash fictions that explore the basic human condition through moments of joy and loss, laughter and tears, and the beauties and burdens of aging. This is a great book of poetry, a great book of visual art, and a remarkable record of the conversation between the two.
About the Author :
Robert L. Dean, Jr. is the author of At the Lake with Heisenberg (Spartan Press, 2018). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flint Hills Review, I-70 Review, Chiron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Shot Glass, Illya's Honey, Red River Review, KYSO Flash, MacQueen's Quinterly, River City Poetry, Heartland! Poetry of Love, Resistance & Solidarity, and the Wichita Broadside Project. He is a multiple Best of the Net nominee and a Pushcart nominee for 2019. He was a quarter-finalist in the 2018 Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. He read at the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival and the Chikaskia Literary Festival in 2018 and 2019. He is event coordinator for Epistrophy: An Afternoon of Poetry and Improvised Music, held annually in Wichita, Kansas. A native Kansan, he has been a professional musician and worked at The Dallas Morning News. He lives in a one-hundred-year-old stone building in Augusta, Kansas, along with a universe of several hundred books, CDs, LPs, two electric basses and a couple dozen hats. In his spare time, he practices the time-honored art of hermitry. Steven Schroeder is a visual artist and poet who lives and works in Chicago. More at stevenschroeder.org. Steven Schroeder
Review :
In "A Blessing," James Wright writes of a pair of horses, "There is no loneliness like theirs," and in these poems of quiet, wise, solitary contemplation, Dean brings hope and warmth to Wright's assertion: we are both together and alone, and there is a peace in this. In an early poem, Dean writes "and the fence keeps / no one out and / no one in, you see." With quiet wisdom, Dean uses paintings like the tip of the candle flame, to be present to the art in life and the life in art, as the best ekphrastic poets do.
--Kevin Rabas, On Drums, Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2017-2019
It is a subtle dance of the pen and brush wedding words to a painting, the soft blending motions of water colors, acrylic, and oil, as they swirl and uplift our visions across the canvas and transform into words. Though a painting maybe worth a thousand words, it is not a one way street. A word can be worth a thousand paintings. This two-way street is driven time and again in this provocative and delightful dialogue between the poet Robert Dean and the poet/painter Steven Schroeder. This book, The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing, proves that the sum is greater than its parts because the words and paintings are of a profound and immeasurable magnitude. With each new viewing, each new reading, each a new conversation, a new vision arises and turns the reader in a new direction. I ask the reader, no, I beg the reader to dive into the poem "When Icarus Turns Ninety" and then step into the painting that inspired the poem. Nothing more could be asked of this book and this brilliant conversation.
--Walter Bargen, First Poet Laureate of Missouri and author of Until Next Time
Robert L. Dean's ekphrastic responses to the paintings of Steven Schroeder bristle with energy and a heady mixture of elegiac and celebratory moods. The collection begins with a quotation from Chuang Tzu, and indeed the five sections that follow reflect a Taoist synthesis of images and words, as Dean uses the artworks as springboards to leap in often unexpected but exhilarating directions. Most of all, though, readers will find rich lyricism in lines such as "the winter winds brittling flesh, / piercing the bones with // cold sharp words // on the order of all things, / no thought // for the shedding of skins, / coats of many colors shrugged off, / no thought // that one of us would be / ever on the outside / looking in." This is a beautiful book by a sensitive poet deeply attuned to the inspiration to be found in Schroeder's magnificent paintings.
--Don Stinson, author of Flatline Horizons
