Ruins

In this book of poems and paintings both poet and artist seek to memorialize the recent industrial past of America as both worker and machine fall into oblivion. Audette paints abandoned factories, ships, bridges, and large machines and much smaller artifacts such as discarded railroad couplings, carburetors and machine tools. In contrast, Nothnagle memorializes the intimate lives of the men and women who made and used these engines and devices in the workshops, now abandoned as they themselves have been; their triumphs and victories forgotten. The poems are lyrical and harsh, short and to the point, knowing and critical, like accents on the canvases. They speak of frailty and strength, chance and misfortune unlike the machines she also writes about. That’s the contrast the reader will find in these poems and paintings: The light and the dark, the majesty and glory of things that worked because of human ingenuity that are now lost, relics of our recent industrial past.

Anna Audette of Hartland, VT Anna Held Audette is a prominent late twentieth century American painter and teacher with works in the National Gallery of Art, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the National Gallery of Science, NASA and a number of important regional museums and private collections. She was diagnosed with Fronto-Temporal Dementia in 2008 at the Adler Center for Geriatric Medicine at Yale. She is the author of two books including the classic 'The Blank Canvas: Inviting the Muse'.

Suzanne Nothnagle Suzanne Nothnagle ran a small, specialized machine shop for 27 years. She is a graduate of Marlboro College and Dartmouth College. Her poetry has appeared in the 'Connecticut Review', 'Portrait', 'Still Puddle poets' and 'The Anthology of New England Writers' among others. She has also written an oral history of the machine tool industry in Windsor and Springfield, Vermont, 'An Oral history of the Connecticut River'. She lives in Hartland, VT and teaches at Granite State College.