Picturing, a book of poems by Jory Mickelson
To be released & shipped: January 22, 2025
$40 (CAD / ~$28.25 USD)
Jory Mickelson is the author of two other books of poetry--All This Divide and Wilderness/Kingdom, winner of the 2020 High Plains Book Award in Poetry. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, The Desert Rat Writers Residency, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. They live and write in the Pacific Northwest.
Paperback, printed and bound by Coach House Press on 70 lb Zephyr Laid paper.
ISBN 978-1-7381784-2-1
Do you see? Every time I attempt to close
there is a new gate we must pass
through. In every story, there comes
the point I can see no further given the line
will never finish
there is a new gate we must pass
through. In every story, there comes
the point I can see no further given the line
will never finish
“I believe the desire to create pictures, David Hockney states, “lies deep within us.” This sentiment is paired with the experience that most of us derive a deep pleasure in looking, beholding, and seeing. And in being seen, truly known. If nothing else, we are deeply visual creatures. Vision is a primary sense and a principal way of making sense of the world.
How we picture is akin to how we perceive and interpret, determining the nature of our experiences and, therefore, the very quality of our lives. Hockney affirms that the history of making images is less about representation and more about how we see.
In this collection of poems, Mickelson re-imagines what words a history of images contains and draws out the desire to be taken in whole and laid bare.
Praise for Picturing:
“If / pleasure is an ending, then surely we are / joined,” Jory Mickelson writes, in Picturing, where the viewer melds with the art, the gaze moves between and beyond, exposing a sorry inside desire’s hinge. From Marilyn Monroe to Icarus, Paudl Cadmus to “the angel’s ruffling wings,” these poems shift the lines between longing and conquest, childhood and history, an open wound and a painter’s caress. Reveling in beauty and damage, this is a book that sings and singes.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art and The Freezer Door
Praise for Picturing:
Jory Mickelson’s third book, Picturing, combines a reverance for the past with a nuanced portrait of the present--a place where the poet confesses, “I have tried my best / to survive” and “I am / willing to make / a deal with God / that even if / I die / let my face still make money.” Mickelson lays bare the implicit narratives that shape our understanding of passion, love, and success, unearthing depths that lie beneath the surface of our collective consciousness. This collection adds a painful counterpoint to cultural reflections on identity and memory.
Ruben Quesada, author of Brutal Companion, winner of the Barrow Street Editors Prize
To be seen is to be known--though something of identity always escapes, Jory Mickelson’s Picturing argues. More completely, one is seen in what one makes: a family, a manifesto, a story “we tell / ourselves when we need / to sleep” and the story “we tell when / we need to stay / awake.” Imagination helps us remake ourselves more completely and intimately, as Mickelson writes about an 1890s photograph of women dressed in traditionally men’s garb: “The dream / of a world held close / then hidden away.” But the imagination needs publishing, even if clandestinely, Mickelson tells us. “Give me one more / hour and I’ll show you,” Mickelson writes, “how the trick was I was / never bound at all.” Picturing undoes the picture, unbinds the ties, and helps us imagine a freer us.
James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy
What makes Jory Mickelson’s new book of poetry, Picturing, so engaging and, at the same time, so extraordinarily moving is how sensitively they weave the many different ways that artists--poets, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, actors amongst many others--look at this world we share and yet see it so differently. I loved how Mickelson asks us in one poem to consider how unique the vision of writer Audre Lorde is and then provides us access to the work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in another or challenges us to consider the way that the work of The Saturday Evening Post cover illustrator J. C. Leyendecker connects us with the paintings of Paul Cadmus and Thomas Eakins and the photographs of drag balls in the mid-seventies by Michael Childers. There is such a delicious range of queer gaze to be found in Picturing! Here Andy Warhol is, in a way, poetically reunited with his lover Keith Haring while in “The Artist’s Model” Mickelson unpacks with great care the relationship between John Singer Sargent and Thomas McKeller, the Black model who for more than a decade played a key role in both the painter’s work and his love life. My favourite work in the collection was the wonderful sequence “The Falls” which references a series of paintings that Warhol created around a publicity still of Marilyn Monroe from Niagara, the film that launched her career--a poem that for this reader captures both the construction of an artistic vision and the range of responses that a work of art can elicit.
Jeffrey Canton, reviewer for The Globe and Mail
Jory Mickelson’s third book, Picturing, combines a reverance for the past with a nuanced portrait of the present--a place where the poet confesses, “I have tried my best / to survive” and “I am / willing to make / a deal with God / that even if / I die / let my face still make money.” Mickelson lays bare the implicit narratives that shape our understanding of passion, love, and success, unearthing depths that lie beneath the surface of our collective consciousness. This collection adds a painful counterpoint to cultural reflections on identity and memory.
Ruben Quesada, author of Brutal Companion, winner of the Barrow Street Editors Prize
To be seen is to be known--though something of identity always escapes, Jory Mickelson’s Picturing argues. More completely, one is seen in what one makes: a family, a manifesto, a story “we tell / ourselves when we need / to sleep” and the story “we tell when / we need to stay / awake.” Imagination helps us remake ourselves more completely and intimately, as Mickelson writes about an 1890s photograph of women dressed in traditionally men’s garb: “The dream / of a world held close / then hidden away.” But the imagination needs publishing, even if clandestinely, Mickelson tells us. “Give me one more / hour and I’ll show you,” Mickelson writes, “how the trick was I was / never bound at all.” Picturing undoes the picture, unbinds the ties, and helps us imagine a freer us.
James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy
What makes Jory Mickelson’s new book of poetry, Picturing, so engaging and, at the same time, so extraordinarily moving is how sensitively they weave the many different ways that artists--poets, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, actors amongst many others--look at this world we share and yet see it so differently. I loved how Mickelson asks us in one poem to consider how unique the vision of writer Audre Lorde is and then provides us access to the work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in another or challenges us to consider the way that the work of The Saturday Evening Post cover illustrator J. C. Leyendecker connects us with the paintings of Paul Cadmus and Thomas Eakins and the photographs of drag balls in the mid-seventies by Michael Childers. There is such a delicious range of queer gaze to be found in Picturing! Here Andy Warhol is, in a way, poetically reunited with his lover Keith Haring while in “The Artist’s Model” Mickelson unpacks with great care the relationship between John Singer Sargent and Thomas McKeller, the Black model who for more than a decade played a key role in both the painter’s work and his love life. My favourite work in the collection was the wonderful sequence “The Falls” which references a series of paintings that Warhol created around a publicity still of Marilyn Monroe from Niagara, the film that launched her career--a poem that for this reader captures both the construction of an artistic vision and the range of responses that a work of art can elicit.
Jeffrey Canton, reviewer for The Globe and Mail