Beholding Eye

These smart, funny ekphrastic poems surprise the reader on every page and surprise anew with each rereading.   Julie KaneGrace Bauer ... deploys the voices of artists and their subjects to consider matters of identity, power, class, anger, and erotics. With her usual high wit, the poet revises the location and meaning of worth and beauty. Bauer's formal skill serves to illuminate the "thick and pungent" paint caked on the hands of the maker, as well as the "civility and containment" we must shun to enter A-R-T."   Hilda RazAnne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Carolyn Kizer -- let them make room for Grace Bauer. Sexton's equal in sardonic vision, Bishop's equal in the music of speech, Kizer's equal in rapier wit ... I, for one, will try to read every word that this woman writes.   Will Slattery