The Bright Obvious by Rebecca A. Spears

Elemental, conversational, spiritual, Rebecca Spears‘ poems focus on a construction of narrative moments converging with a larger collective story. The Vincent Van Gogh poems are connective meditations on art, landscape, and loneliness. The “bright obvious” is the threshold of paradox and mystery: darkness ablaze with moonlight, deserts lush with life, a poet creating beauty `to let your own heart work again.’
–Laurie Kutchins

Rebecca Spears‘ The Bright Obvious offers us “an animal story hidden in a larger one,” which the poet creates through acts of portraiture, confession, and ekphrasis. Her poems define their own thresholds and then cross them, whether these are lines of personal desire or those boundaries that separate a painting from the world beyond its frame. In that world, the landscapes of Van Gogh’s Provence and the author’s American Southwest become superimposed, then sketched, revised, and re-painted for us with sweetness and shadows and ache, till we feel we have bathed in the pigments of both imagined regions.
–Christopher Bakken