Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O'Keeffe

by Jennifer Sinor

Overview

Georgia O’Keeffe mistrusted words. She claimed color as her language. Nevertheless, in the course of her long life, the great American painter wrote thousands of letters—more than two thousand survive between her and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, alone. Jennifer Sinor’s Letters Like the Day honors O’Keeffe, her modernist landscapes, and, crucially, the value of letter writing. In the painter’s correspondence, we find an intimacy with words that is all her own. Taking her letters as a touchstone, Sinor experiments with the limits of language using the same aesthetic that drove O’Keeffe’s art. Through magnification, cropping, and juxtaposition—hallmarks of modernism—Sinor explores the larger truths at the center of O’Keeffe’s work: how we see, capture, and create. Letters Like the Day pursues the highest function of art—to take one’s medium to the edge and then push beyond.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826357847
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	03/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	168
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jennifer Sinor is the author of several books, including Ordinary Trauma: A Memoir. She teaches creative writing at Utah State University, where she is a professor of English.

Table of Contents

Dear Reader

Letters Like the Day
Holes in the Sky
A Walk into the Night
More Feeling Than Brain
Cleaving, 1929
Taking Myself to the Sun
Perfectly Fantastic
Spiral
I Must Speak to You

Acknowledgments
Notes

Editorial Reviews

"With the precision and grace of a poet, and with a welcome authenticity rare these days, Sinor writes a hybrid book of memoir, cultural commentary, biography, anthology. Even those with no special interest in American modernism in general, or O'Keeffe in particular, will find here a world of wide wonder, from the black and lit places of the heart, from painted canyons to far-flung shores."—Christopher Cokinos, author of The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars and Bodies, of the Holocene

"Inspired by the great modernist O'Keeffe, Sinor's essays are also original and modern: strange and poetic, sensual and provocative, and at times, heartbreaking."—Karen Karbo, author of How Georgia Became O'Keeffe: Lessons on the Art of Living

"Jennifer Sinor approaches the intimacy of letter writing as a poet, scholar, detective, and practitioner of the art form, showing just how vast epistolary space-time can be. She reveals how O'Keeffe's art-life continuum teaches us all to see and love more wondrously, wholly, and passionately."—Lia Purpura, author of On Looking: Essays

From the Publisher