Dear Charis: by Sarah Grieve and Dominika Wrozynski

Sarah Grieve and Dominika Wrozynski collaborate with the ghost of Charis Wilson, who at one time collaborated with photographer Edward Weston. Grieve and Wrozynski write to each other, addressing their friendship as well as to Charis, a neglected writer in the shadow of a great artist. Through their epistolaries, we learn one poet is about to be wed and the other is a child of divorce while Charis was an empowered muse/model in an unconventional marriage. The poets assure Charis that they are “not trying to claim” her, but only honor her writing and revise her obituary from “model” to “writer.” Part historical investigation, part love letter to the past (and to the future), Dear Charis is a brilliant look at women who look straight back (through the lens and on the page).

–Denise Duhamel

How does a woman become herself in a world dominated by men? In this lapidary book, Sarah Grieve and Dominika Wrozynski search for the answer in the life of Charis Wilson, who from 1937-1939 documented her journey with photographer Edward Weston through the landscapes of California and the Southwest. This dual collaboration is a mosaic of cars, grocery lists, saguaro cacti, and journeys through Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, and the Mojave desert in the Weston-Wilson archive, but it is also illuminated by the poets’ worlds as they search for the free-thinking woman who was forging an independent life in the first half of the twentieth century. The term that comes to mind is archival poetry, the rhythms of a past life and its mix with the present moment, but that doesn’t really give a sense of the incandescent touch of Grieve and Wrozynski. A tender and intense debut.

–Barbara Hamby, author of Holoholo and Burn

It is a truth universally unacknowledged that a great male artist will overshadow his artist-wife, who is remembered (if at all) as his “muse.” As one poem in this radiantly corrective collection, Dear Charis:, wryly observes of Edward Weston’s young model-wife Charis Wilson, “Even in death, you can’t be your own woman.” A decade ago, poets Sarah Grieve and Dominika Wrozynski visited The Huntington Library’s Weston exhibit and discovered the work of his vibrant writer-wife. In the beautifully evocative epistolary poems of Dear Charis:, Grieve and Wrozynski succeed in meeting Charis on her own terms. Guided by Charis herself, they find her “essence,” tenderly resurrecting her through the conduit of their own sympathetic lives as sister-artists. Dear Charis: is spell-binding.

–Cynthia Hogue, author of instead, it is dark