The Night Watch

In poems as beautifully crafted as they are engaging, Barbara Krasner brings the world of fine art to life. Of course, Krasner excels at creating inventive metaphors, cultivating surprise and risk on the level of diction, and orchestrating wild associative leaps. Yet what sets these poems apart from other ekphrastic projects is Krasner's enviable command of narrative. A masterful storyteller, Krasner imbues each painting, each art piece, and each artist's legacy with new emotional and historical resonance. And most importantly of all, Krasner celebrates, honors, and amplifies the mystery inherent in the creative process. Bravissimo!

-Kristina Marie Darling, Fulbright Scholar and author, Daylight Has Already Come: Selected Poems

Barbara Krasner has an uncanny ability to breathe life into old Dutch, French, and Russian paintings with her words, bringing readers into unexpected intimacy with people and places of another time. She weaves her own memories and ancestors in and out of these encounters, showing us how our own stories are intertwined with other histories. This collection is gorgeous, insightful, passionate, furious, and important.

-Lorette C. Luzajic, founder and editor, The Ekphrastic Review

Barbara Krasner is a master of ekphrastic poetry. The key to writing good poetry based on art is to find surprises, those wonderful "aha" moments. Don't describe what is on the canvas, but how it affects you. Krasner delivers. Sometimes she speaks of a centuries-old canvas like it's a current event or a tragic memory of the Holocaust. In "Fiddler as Witness," I love how she pictures her grandfather floating above Chagall's rooftop and sailing to America. Krasner's voltas (a tone shift or change of topic) make me think, "Wow!" before I back up and read the poem again.

-Alarie Tennille, author, Running Counterclockwise and Three A.M. at the Museum