John Marin was a major figure among the cutting-edge circle of American modernist artists who showed his work in Alfred Stieglitz’s New York galleries from 1909 until 1950. A new collection of the artist’s work at the Arkansas Arts Center, given by Marin’s daughter-in-law, forms the basis of this first book of essays and images to concentrate on Marin’s drawings in the context of Marin’s life, his watercolors, and his etchings.

We follow Marin to his most famous subject matter: New York City and the coast of Maine. Foundational drawings and an unfinished watercolor of the towering Woolworth Building, still under construction when they were made in 1912, begin the story of a renowned group of watercolors first exhibited in 1913 at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery and then at the ground-breaking 1913 Armory Show. Other images take us to lesser-known locales, such as the Ramapo Mountains in New York and New Jersey where Marin often painted when he couldn’t get to Maine. More obscure aspects of the artist’s career explored in this collection include portraits of friends and family, charming drawings of animals, and circus scenes.

Becoming John Marin invites readers to look over this important artist’s shoulder as he created and honed the sketches he would interpret into completed watercolors and etchings, illustrating the evolution of his style and methods as he transformed from intuitive draftsman to innovative modernist watercolorist and etcher.

Finalist, 2018 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Ya Te Veo takes as its title the name of a mythical tree that eats people. Like the branches of that tree, the poems in this book seem to capture and nourish themselves on a diverse cast of would-be passers-by, drawing their life-force from the resulting synthesis of characters. Among the seized are poets and painters alongside musicians from Garth Brooks to Wu-Tang Clan to the composer Morton Feldman, whose mysterious personality serves as a backdrop in many poems for meditations on intimacy, ethics, and anxiety.

As the phrase “ya te veo” (“I see you”) implies, this is a book interested in revealing what we think is hidden, in questioning the gap inside all of us, a gap between what we feel and what we say and do, making space for our many contradictions.

Like the works of Feldman, these poems focus and recede, experimenting with form in order to accomplish a state of deep concentration. They impersonate sonnets, ghazals, terza rima, monologues, translations, and freestyles, but inexactly, embracing failed imitation as an opportunity to remix the familiar.