Black and Blue

"In Black and Blue, Carol Mavor lives with the wounding memories of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the regime of hate in American racial history. She looks at herself through a kaleidoscope of texts and images whose pain her own writing seeks to alleviate. The reader witnesses conflicted emotions circulating within a gallery of figures defining the melancholic tenor of critical and creative labors of the last three decades." Tom Conley, author of An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France "Black and Blue is only partly, though brilliantly, about the colours of its title. It's avowedly indebted to novelist-philosopher William H. Gass's extraordinary 1976 essay On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, and shares that book's super-subjective love of lists and tendency to intuitive digressions... Black and Blue has a poetic logic of mourning, and its rage to make too much sense." - Brian Dillon, Art Review, October 2012 "Carol Mavor has developed a unique way of responding to images and to their uses by artists and writers: with appetite and fastidious delicacy, she brings the full sensorium synaesthetically into play. Black and Blue is a highly wrought montage, an original attempt to open up the meanings of visual objects in relation to experience, and a startlingly daring account of a symbolic field. It resonates with - and pays tribute to - such key art historical works as Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and William Gass's prose poem, On Being Blue." - Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights