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Praise for Camera

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The poems in Maxine Chernoff’s new book wish “To be the camera for your gaze.” They are precise in just the way art is precise. They frame the world as a camera’s lens might frame a portion of what the eye might apprehend, adding a finely wrought filter of human feeling to the arbitrary world. Thanks to the artist’s care, we look through this Camera and see everything, vibrantly, again and again.

~ CAMILLE T. DUNGY

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I marvel at how the lines in Maxine Chernoff’s Camera fold and unfold, at once seemingly effortless and precisely sculpted, all while capturing the fractures and pockets of beauty in our broken world. “Nothing undoes day’s dazed / grace unless it is captioned / or chiseled...” Camera accomplishes that difficult work. The poems breathe with and for the reader as bright and vital company in a dark time.

~ JOSEPH MASSEY

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“I lifted to mind a piece of bright blue air,” wrote Robert Creeley, in a line Maxine Chernoff quotes in Camera. It’s apt: this is a book full of air and breezes, populated with doves and thrushes, swallows and crows. It’s an earthy book, too, where tender roots push through an eroticized earth (“thigh of hill/breast of leaves/ belly of witness”). It’s never just a book of the body, though, or of the material world: each sharply sensed moment spirals out into history, geography, biology, or grief. It is a book where the world aspires to be voiced, and where words “send their tendrils toward the next refrain.” Camera lifts a world to mind, and holds it there.

~ ROBERT ARCHAMBEAU

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