Books by Katie Farris

Gossip & Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems & Prose

by Ilya Kaminsky, Valzhyna Mort, Katie Farris

There has been no anthology in English dedicated to the poetics of the great generation of Russian modernists. For a group of poets so widely admired, relatively little seems known about their philosophy of poetry and their poetic influences, and although there is tremendous aesthetic diversity in this group, they have more in common than many readers assume. Russian poetry was a small world, made even smaller by the arrests, disappearances, pogroms, famines, assassinations, and political conflagration of the revolutionary era, and literary differences were often overcome by a mutual sense of historic cataclysm. This anthology’s structure is like textile, with many common threads intertwining, doubling back, sometimes unraveling―creating a matrix of poetic conversation: Mayakovsky on Khlebnikov, Pasternak on Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva on Pasternak, Brodsky on Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova on Mandelstam. Shared themes range from expected (the word) to serendipitous (the ocean). Above all these poets are obsessed with proximity―to God, to nature and place, to poetic predecessors, to language (their own and others), and always, forever, to the inexpressible.

Vija Celmins

by Ilya Kaminsky, Andrew Winer, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, Katie Farris, Robert Gober

More than 90 of Celmins' astonishing hyperrealistic paintings are contextualized with writings by the artist herself and by luminaries including Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk and Marlene Dumas

Latvian American artist Vija Celmins (born 1938) is a master of subtle visual power. She is best known for her captivating paintings and drawings depicting galaxies, surfaces of the moon, desert floors, oceans and spider webs. Her works are not monumental; they are painted with a restrained palette and defy quick viewing. But once you are involved with them, your gaze gets caught up in them and they unfold their fascination and great beauty. This monograph presents all her approximately 90 exhibited artworks as well as a selection of documentary photographs. Several commentaries by the artist on her works are included, most of them published for the first time. Contributions by renowned authors and artists such as Julian Bell, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Marlene Dumas and Robert Gober provide new perspectives on the artist's impressive oeuvre.