Entering Iván Argote’s The Burden of the Invisible at SCAD Museum of Art, museum goers trip. The floor is an uneven red, a pigment-dyed cement mimicking something like sand, something like sea. There are hard edges, small set-in-stone waves, and as viewers’ eyes sort through the monumental upside-down heads, the created wreckage of something just post, their steps are interrupted.

Anne Waldman is breathlessly encyclopedic. Her breadth is exhaustive, at times exhausting—the whole of a life filling, spilling over pages with the urgency of a woman who knows too well how things get lost. She is called on by her elders, as we (readers, poets, artists) feel called on by her; again and again she invokes Amiri Baraka’s call to action, the instruction she carries with her: “Don’t let this stuff get buried.”

 

In Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal, poet and critic John Yau’s aptly titled new monograph of the beloved artist and writer, Yau has successfully collaged the collagist, the painter, the poet, and the prodigy.

Tyhe Cooper is a writer working in experimental prose, poetry, and digitality. They are the Production Editor and a poetry events curator at the Brooklyn Rail.