78 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Grounded in technical mastery, the poems in Out of Speech address issues both universal and timely. In this series of ekphrastic works, Adam Vines explores themes as varied as exile, family, disease, desire, and isolation through an array of twentieth- and twenty-first century painters, including Picasso, Hopper, Rothko, de Kooning, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Artschwager. He also goes within and beyond these works of art to explore characters set in the present-day museums, from a bored docent to a misinformed “explainer” of an artwork’s meaning. Combining these two views—one that looks at the painting and another that looks around it—his poems affirm the artist’s insights into the complexity of being human.
Adam Vines is associate professor of English and director of creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of three collections of poetry, including Out of Speech, and coauthor of two collections. His work has appeared in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and the Southern Review, among other journals.
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