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From the archives

A Strange Road to Hell

Technology, culture and the march to World War One

Lax Americana

What happens if Donald Trump returns to the White House?

Gardens of Mourning

The vast, idealistic effort to bury World War One's fallen soldiers

Vanity Fair’s Lucian Freud

 

marathoning into the night — only so many brushstrokes

left — terre verts mixed with umber — swift swipes

of flake white

 

brushwork — deft and layered — smooth around the man’s

shoulders — crusty and impassioned

along the arms

 

every twitch of facial muscle — caught — every bulge

of subcutaneous thigh-fat — whorled

rippled, smeared

 

soft sable — swapped — for bristly hog’s hair brushes

snipped to nubs — the middle son of the youngest

son of Sigmund Freud

 

not nudes — his insistence — but naked portraits — “best

realist painter alive” — fathered — with six women

fourteen acknowledged children

 

there is only — long scarf knotted — so much hypocrisy

rakishly at the neck — I allow myself — work ethic

on overdrive

 

selfishness — gobs of palette knife wipe-off — is what —

like seagull guano — it takes to make — his studio walls

coated with — great art

 

my work — big canvases — purely an attempt — unsparing — at a

record — autobiographical — of myself —

and my surroundings

Ruth Roach Pierson taught women’s history, feminist and post-colonial studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto from 1980 to 2001, and European and women’s history at Memorial University of Newfoundland from 1970 to 1980. Since retiring she has published three poetry collections: Where No Window Was (BuschekBooks, 2002), Aide-Mémoire (BuschekBooks, 2007), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award in 2008, and Contrary (Tightrope Books, 2011). A fourth, Realignment, will appear from Palimpsest Press in 2015. She is the editor of the anthology of film poems I Found It at the Movies (Guernica Editions, 2014).

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