DROWNING GIRL

$17.95

DROWNING GIRL by Kurt Cole Eidsvig is a captivating exploration of art, personal connection, and storytelling, inspired by Roy Lichtenstein's iconic painting of the same name. Eidsvig, an accomplished arts writer, poet, and fiction author, crafts a unique meditation on the intimate process of engaging with art. The book employs a diverse array of creative mediums, including text messages, footnotes, song lyrics, Morse code, movie quotes, emails, and memory, to weave a multi-layered narrative. This narrative delves into the history and significance of each dot in Lichtenstein's masterpiece, while simultaneously challenging the conventional boundaries of poetry.


In his process, Eidsvig paid participants to stand before the painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and count the dots, incorporating their survey responses as one of many expressive elements in the book.


What truly sets DROWNING GIRL apart is its rich, immersive storytelling set against the looming threat of an approaching hurricane. Readers follow the narrator on a journey along the East Coast, where the book transcends a mere exploration of art to become a multifaceted adventure of self-discovery. Destinations and arrivals serve as metaphors for the unfolding of personal and artistic journeys. Through inventive narrative techniques and the backdrop of impending danger, DROWNING GIRL offers a thought-provoking and engaging exploration of the profound connections that can be forged between art, the self, and the world around us.

DROWNING GIRL by Kurt Cole Eidsvig is a captivating exploration of art, personal connection, and storytelling, inspired by Roy Lichtenstein's iconic painting of the same name. Eidsvig, an accomplished arts writer, poet, and fiction author, crafts a unique meditation on the intimate process of engaging with art. The book employs a diverse array of creative mediums, including text messages, footnotes, song lyrics, Morse code, movie quotes, emails, and memory, to weave a multi-layered narrative. This narrative delves into the history and significance of each dot in Lichtenstein's masterpiece, while simultaneously challenging the conventional boundaries of poetry.


In his process, Eidsvig paid participants to stand before the painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and count the dots, incorporating their survey responses as one of many expressive elements in the book.


What truly sets DROWNING GIRL apart is its rich, immersive storytelling set against the looming threat of an approaching hurricane. Readers follow the narrator on a journey along the East Coast, where the book transcends a mere exploration of art to become a multifaceted adventure of self-discovery. Destinations and arrivals serve as metaphors for the unfolding of personal and artistic journeys. Through inventive narrative techniques and the backdrop of impending danger, DROWNING GIRL offers a thought-provoking and engaging exploration of the profound connections that can be forged between art, the self, and the world around us.

Advance Praise for Kurt Cole Eidsvig’s Drowning Girl

Kurt Cole Eidsvig’s writing is noteworthy in how it synthesizes the aesthetics of pop art with street-level romantic minimalism, bound together in a worldview apprenticed at once to visual arts, poetry, fiction, and screenwriting.  In Drowning Girl, Eidsvig dances through interconnected worlds—inner, outer, emotional, harsh at times, and, one feels, even joyful—to tell a story at once visceral and liminal, personal and yet deeply informed by the cultural moment.  His prose-poem-novel seems to take “I don’t care!  I’d rather sink . . . ” from Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl as a starting point, an invitation, and a microcosm.  Eidsvig’s work, centered at the intersection of art and life, is irrepressible, unique, entertaining, clever, and perhaps because of this, essential.—Michael Davis, author of Gravity
 
Drowning Girl is a euphoric and melancholic meditation on existing between landscapes. How do you establish a YOU ARE HERE, when you are also there and there and there? This is the mind’s travel itinerary, dizzying as Lichtenstein’s canvas of Ben Day dots: Key West, the Berkshires, Boston, New York, Montana. How do you travel when the map is coming apart at its folds? When no landscape is drawn to scale? You orient yourself by building your own cathedrals: art, old neighborhoods, the memories of lovers, mothers, fathers, and friends. This is where you came from. This was the winding path you took. You can look back, even savor the footnotes, but you can’t stay long. A seasoned traveler knows the arrows of time are pointed, annoyingly, forward. Eidsvig welcomes us to hitch a ride in order to find out how to curate a life when your museum is ever moving. This is a painstaking cataloging of the bitter and the beautiful moments in life. The reader is invited to be, like the narrator, a “painter in a hurricane”—storm chaser, survivor, then excavator, unearthing the artful from the numbing disaster of technology and pop culture.—Wendy Erman Harvey, author of Vicinity

Drowning Girl is a tour de force of poetry that alludes, scampers, plays and generously appropriates from a wide variety of sources, using the Roy Lichtenstein painting as ekphrasic inspiration, unmasking the “Brad” in the painting as bard, lover and playmaker. Replete with art and literature references, this Ben-Day dotted work emits Morse codes filled with delight.—Michel Steven Krug, author of Jazz at the International Festival of Despair

Eidsvig’s Drowning Girl is an immersive and deeply evocative journey through art, addiction, obsession, and the enduring power of fleeting connection amidst the relentless tide of entropy. Cutting, profound, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, Drowning Girl is both a celebration of art and a testament to the unlikely convergence of grief and grace through which it is made manifest. It’s a wonderful book.—Aryn Kyle, author of Boys and Girls Like You and Me

 

About the Author

Kurt Cole Eidsvig is the author of the books The Simple Art of Murder, OxyContin for Breakfast, Art Official, and POP X POETRY. His work in both poetry and art criticism has been featured in regular columns for publications like Big Red & Shiny, ArtsAmerica, SpinRecords, and Examiner.com. Eidsvig taught art and writing at UMASS Boston, the University of Montana, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. His writing has earned recognition like the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Award, the Edmund Freeman Award, and a teaching fellowship from the University of Montana. A visual artist as well as a writer, his work is part of numerous private and commercial collections and has been included in exhibitions in LA, Boston, and Sydney, Australia. More information is available at EidsvigArt.com

 

  • Genre: Multigenre Hybrid

    ISBN: 978-1963115109

    Publication Date: September 24, 2024

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