At Octopus Magazine, Lucy Ives reviews Max Winter’s The Pictures.
… In effect written instructions, a kit, for the private generation of twenty-one photographs and nine films in the reader’s mind. But assembly, the getting of something that can be seen from the words of the poems in The Pictures, is not without difficulty. In fact, ‘seeing’ often occurs here only partially or not at all. The manual is imperfect. Also, it knows this…..
The Pictures has made me notice many things which are not there. The tone of the voice employed throughout the book is distinctive, too, and stands out like a visual detail, a character in its own right. This is due to the narrator’s skillful slight of hand; denial is combined with wonder, naïveté with all-knowingness. The seeming limitedness of this speaker, often failing to describe or know with certainty, creates a fascinating kind of realism, neither psychological nor precisely sur-. The Pictures is then both a good experiment and solid evidence that something new can still happen. It’s very much worth reading.
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