Rader, Dean: Before the Borderless (hc)

Copper Canyon Press, hardcover Publication Date: April 25, 2023 Publisher Marketing: Winner of the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize Dean Rader reaches beyond artistic description to engage Twombly's work in conversation. In 2018, just a few weeks after his father's death, Dean Rader made a pilgrimage to the Gagosian Gallery in New York to see a retrospective of Cy Twombly's work, In Beauty It is Finished: Drawings 1951-2008. The exhibit led to a poem that would become the genesis of this book -- from loss and fear to regret and beauty, Before the Borderless: The Cy Twombly Cycle reaches for the embodiment of emotion and the aesthetics of possibility. Through a range of experimental forms, including a series of octets, Rader writes to decode the gestures and energies in Twombly's drawings and paintings. He reaches past observation and admiration to create a game of echolocation, reflecting Twombly's infinite scrawls as "saddle stitch, spaghetti curl, white whirl." Even as Rader searches for pro