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Issue 12: | March 2022 |
Poem: | 126 words |
holds court in a harvested cornfield where her pages flock, hundreds of sandhill cranes slate-gray, rusty undersides, crimson crowns. Their queen looms, the marrow of their circle. The ruffled alabaster plumage of her hat, collar, hair matches the white peacock she walks on a leash. The waterfowl preen, titillate, placate with dance: bow, leap, staccato wing flap, the cadence accompanied by trills and purrs that echo through bleak autumn air. She carries a scepter, crest a shock of quills and thistles. Or is it a riding crop to maintain distance, keep the fray and their stiletto bills away? She shuns the bare, tilted oak, the ashen farmhouse—her birthplace—riddled with secrets.
—Inspired by Andrea Kowch’s painting The Courtiers (2016) *
* Publisher’s Note:
The Courtiers (acrylic on canvas, 2016) by Andrea Kowch (born 1986 in Detroit,
Michigan) may be viewed at The Bennett Collection of Women Realists; link retrieved on
3 March 2022:
https://www.thebennettartcollection.com/artist/andrea-kowch/
As the artist says while describing her work, “Painting is bliss... painting
is my oxygen...” Source: a brief video (just under five minutes) on YouTube:
Andrea Kowch:
The Courtiers (19 July 2016), RJD Fine Arts Gallery.
See also this biographical article by American artist and educator Thomas Arthur Smith,
16 ANDREA KOWCH, in 100 Greatest Women Artists of All Time...So
Far (16 August 2020); includes 32 paintings by Ms. Kowch.
is the author of five chapbooks, and three collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), and Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021). Her work is published in The Adirondack Review, The Ekphrastic Review, I-70 Review, Juniper, Poet Lore, Naugatuck River Review, Salamander, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her poetry reviews appear in Poetry Matters.
Author’s website: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/
⚡ Emily Carr: Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1932–35), ekphrastic poem by Karen George in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 6, January 2021)
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