Fist

by Emily Wall

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Fist comes to us in the voice of artist Georgia O’Keeffe. In this chapbook, O’Keeffe offers readers details of her life—as an artist, as a wife to a man who both helped and harmed her, and as an older woman who found her spiritual home. Each poem is ekphrastic, written in response to pieces of her art; epistolic, in homage to the many letters she wrote during her lifetime; and persona, based on factual events and experiences.

Fist is part of a trilogy of chapbooks written in the voices of three powerful and influential women: Mary, mother of Jesus, artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and chef and food activist Alice Waters.
     

“Emily Wall’s Fist is quite remarkable. Remarkable in that it paints a poetic picture of Georgia O’Keefe not only as artist but also as the seminal person, the feminist and visionary, she was. It’s remarkable, too, in its lyric form—how the language and lines diverge and meet, dip across the page (one imagines like O’Keefe’s paintbrush, perhaps), and in the end become their own vocabulary of art and artist. Not just the artistry of Georgia O’Keefe, but the artistry of Emily Wall, an accomplished poet, teacher, mother, feminist, visionary. Song and Fist is a rich and necessary collection that proves there is no hard line between canvas and memory, language and light, landscape and love.”  —Simmons Buntin, Editor-in-Chief, Terrain.org

“Dear Canyon, Dear Fist, Dear Dark Slit, Dear Walking Out, Dear Holy…. the poems of Fist give voice and, yes, song, to Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings.  In these chronological ekphrastic poems (each one anchored by a specific painting), Wall has found a way to sing Georgia O’Keeffe’s life anew through her canvases.  The book moves episodically, pointlistically, from moment to moment in O’Keeffe’s life and work. Wall’s poems are both question and answer.  “—dear claw—/—how sharply beautiful I am—,” Wall writes. And these honed poems both acknowledge and turn away from the painful misogyny in O’Keeffe’s life.  They take her experiences and hone them to blades.  Painting by painting, Wall’s poems honor O’Keeffe’s vision and, too, free themselves from it and explore the wilder mysteries of her work.”  -—Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica and Theorem