Malleable Forms

Reviews

“With this collection of forty-seven pieces on literature, painting, photography, music, and a multitude of other fascinations, hauntings, and obsessions, Meeka Walsh stakes out a position as one of today’s most omnivorous and original lyric-essayists. Her restless polymathic mind leaps from one artist and discipline to another in always-unlikely permutations of inquiry and engagement. Her curiosity operates within a complicated architecture of deeply felt personal experience, while her vivid inhabitation of myths built-in her earliest childhood explains her relationship to the world and art. Her work is airborne, bearing aloft Robert Frank, Walter Benjamin, Fleur Jaeggy, Clarice Lispector, Rilke, and Caravaggio on flights that never fail to nail their landings. Walsh’s departed parents and grandparents and her beloved ghosts of the diaspora are never far from her thoughts. She bounces her reactions off those who came before, off the people and places who made her. In line after line, page after page, piece after piece, she makes us realize we are all writing our own artful autobiographies. She is a writer in mad, mad love with art. I love this book!” — Guy Maddin