TENSION:RUPTURE
Poetry by Cutter Streeby and Paintings by Michael Haight
This book features fifteen new paintings from my series ‘Alcoholic Crepuscules’ alongside poems by Cutter Streeby. Framed around contemporary rites of passage and coming-of-age, the paintings are scenes from drinking binges that crossed over into the threshold of new days. Each milieu is reminiscent of the failings and lessons of our childhoods still playing out beyond that constructed realm. Cruelty, responsibility, wasting time, wasting money, and jealousy are a few of the calamities rendered in my works from the series. Click the image to order a copy from the Tupelo Press website.
“Tension : Rupture is a brilliant shapeshifting book that repurposes the ekphrasis as a mode of enquiry. Cutter Streeby’s engagement with Michael Haight’s ephemeral works, Alcoholic Crepuscules, offers us vivid painterly poems often laced with the surreal. There’s an alchemy of sorts, a reaching into and melding into Haight’s de-stabilizing work. Both artists operate in a zone of intensity that offers a reader different levels of immersion and experience.”
—Mona Arshi
“Isolated from my friends due to the global pandemic, I’m ravenous for good conversations. Tension : Rupture arrived just in time. The conversation between Michael Haight and Cutter Streeby is enthralling, bright with human excess and intimacies. Streeby’s poems trouble into speech the tender and volatile flesh in Haight’s art, and the color in Haight’s art is lyrical, transcendent. Each painting, each poem filled ‘my living room with burning stars.’”
—Eduardo Corral
“In Tension : Rupture, Cutter Streeby navigates desire and poesis with language as a taut and slippery lifeline in poems complemented and complicated by Michael Haight’s hallucinatory vignettes veering from bacchanal to disaster and back again. Though tonally elegiac, Streeby’s poems trouble easy divisions between past and present, asking what memories still keep making us in their wakes and our awakenings. Streeby traverses time and tongues, eschewing a monolithic origin story and crafting a dazzling mosaic of originary moments instead.”
—Dora Malech
“Ekphrasis has many faces. Re-enactments in one medium of a work in another can grow tedious. The true process involves touching base, understanding that base, then dancing down a course beginning in that understanding. That is the course followed by the collaboration between artist Michael Haight and poet Cutter Streeby. Here the artist’s mostly water color suggestions of flesh and circumstance taken from a series titled Alcoholic Crepusculesprompt poems, prose, and adventures across various fields, essentially thematic but rushing off into associated imagery. It makes for an exciting set of collisions as much as collaborations. There are doors constantly opening onto potentially fierce landscapes the reader senses before being propelled onward.”
—George Szirtes
“In this beautiful collaboration Tension : Rupture the bright architectures of bodies are ablaze on both canvas and page. Haight’s vibrant colors complement the energy of Streeby’s lines, and the union confronts the rending of intimacy with a rendering of it. Here among the heliotropes and blood halos, ‘language is a conspiracy between two people.’ Figure and syllabary create a dialogue across this book, giving a name to each feeling and a voice to every fire.”
—Traci Brimhall
Long Form Reviews of the book can be found here:
Review of Tension:Rupture by Arturo Desimone
Review of Tension:Rupture by Michael Kleiza