Barry Wallenstein

Thirteen one-page poems that particularize intriguing male characters in odd places by Barry Wallenstein, with twenty-eight contrapuntal pictorial and street photographs by Barbara Rosenthal.Barry Wallenstein says: In 2020 Xanadu Press published my chapbook, Time on the Move, a collaboration between my poems and surreal photographs by artist Barbara Rosenthal. The dominant theme of those poems, as I neared my 80th year, was age-appropriate: one's mortality through the passage of time.Now, five years later, I'm still attached to those themes but have been able to escape them by developing character sketches. Parts of me are no doubt, in many of these individuals, but they are there without conscious decision. These characters are all fictitious but for the penultimate poem, "The Chief." I wish that one were a made-up character.Barbara Rosenthal says: A l l p h o t o s a r e 3 5 m m f u l l - f r a m e, s h o t b e t w e e n 1 9 7 0 - 2 0 2 5, t h e b l a c k- a n d - w h i t e s primarily on the streets of Manhattan, the color everywhere else. The years and places are noted in their titles, with file numbers as month.year.roll.frame, or sometimes digitized index number. Very few of these have been published previously, although several have been fabricated as 11" x 14" selenium toned gelatin silver editions of six, and/or pigment prints.It is unusual for me to make public my "street photography." I usually publish and exhibit either "surreal photographs," as were included in Time on the Move, Barry Wallenstein's first chapbook with Xanadu, or "surreal-to-conceptual wall works," which incorporate them.Needless to say, I'm both grateful to Barry for asking me to collaborate once again, and excited to be bringing out this somewhat hidden aspect of my work, one that fits relatively neatly into the usual canon of photography.About the Press: Xanadu Press i s t h e m i x e d i m a g e /t e x t - b a s e d o f t h e t w o i m p r i n t s p u b l i s h e d by invitation within Homo FuturusTM Editions at eMediaLoft.org. These are books in which pictures and texts are imaginative and visually linked. Our other imprint, Washington Street Press, produces visual art monographs and text-based books of fiction and non-fiction. Both are designed and edited by media artist/writer Barbara Rosenthal. Her periodic column of philosophy about the interconnection of art and artist, A Crack in the Sidewalk, has appeared in Ragazine and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art. Her bookworks are in the collections of The Whitney, MoMA, Tate, Berlin Kunstbibliotek, Artpool Budapest, et al, and available from Printed Matter under the trademark she's used since 1982.eMediaLoft.org is located in the neon-effused live-work loft Rosenthal shared with our late Director Emeritus, Bill Creston, within the Westbeth Arts Complex on the Hudson River in the Highline / West Village neighborhood of NYC. It is a privately funded loose consortium of artists and who create hard-to-place, hard-to-categorize works, primarily using replicable or recordable media (camera and electronic arts, performance, audio and writing) with a strong conceptual base and discernible philosophical perspective.

Barry Wallenstein's poetry, from his first book in 1977 to now, addresses his awareness of time's swift passing. The poems continue this time-honored theme and its attendant thoughts and emotions. Now in his eighth decade this theme is paramount. While time is explicitly central in the first and eighth sections, other sections speak of desire, music, current events, creatures of all sizes and states of mind. Poems in each of the groups reflect the anxieties of our current period including references to the ongoing pandemic and quarantine, as well as overriding reflections on temporality. These poems also are full of appreciation and gratitude for life's bounty. While avoiding the personal or autobiographical, Wallenstein's emotional life is more apparent here than in his work of the past. Poetry.

poetry and photography Nine one-page poems about the fleeting nature of time and relationships by Barry Wallenstein and thirty-four small contrapuntal surreal photographs by Barbara Rosenthal.Barry Wallensteins poetry lures us into his jazz-rhythmed territory by pointing his personal compass straight toward our own active places. Once there, we meet up with our own demons and devines on the odd-numbered pages, while Barbara Rosenthal's photographs on the even pages wrench the steering wheel right out from our moving, reeling stops at stop signs, and drive us into our own deeper dreams and nightmares. This is a book of unpretentious poetry and unmanipulated photographs that seems so straightforward and beautiful and easy to ease into the times and places and people we meet here, but as we travel through it, turning pages, re-reading, looking and reading and looking and reading again, we recognize everyone and everything and every place, as one we've visited on our own, but never known its reality, and its shared signifcance to us all, till now.

Poetry. "Drastic Dislocations" is the title poem of the section of new poems in DRASTIC DISLOCATIONS, and this title is consistent with many of his concerns registered in the poetry he began writing in his teens. His first publications were in the Transatlantic Review in 1964, but it was not until 1977 that BOA Editions published his first book of poems, Beast Is a Wolf with Brown Fire. This new volume includes the author's choices from each of his six previous books, poems reflecting the socio-political life of the time as well as the perennial, transcendent themes of eros and thanatos.

"The feeling here is 'urban' -- a certain removal or distancing combined with keen awareness, the sense of the impersonal wash of night coming over the lonely multitudes amid the surrealistic concrete.... The wry, lost energy of these pieces is the lyric voice of its generation." - M.L. Rosenthal