AF2 Review: Andrew Brenza's Neoconcretist Ekphrasis

Colorways: Poems & Images

By Andrew Brenza

Tallahassee, Anhinga Press, 2024

Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series, Kristine Snodgrass, Curator

114 pages, 6 x 9, full color

 

Review by De Villo Sloan

For the second, full-length collection to be published in the newly established Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series, curator Kristine Snodgrass selected Colorways by Andrew Brenza. The book was officially released March 1, 2024.

Brenza’s Colorways is a sequence of minimalist, unpunctuated poems that alternate with extraordinary black & white and color visual poems.

Brenza uses a variant of Ekphrasis for the book’s structure. The text-image nature of the visual/concrete poems interact with the organic forms of the minimalist verse to create play and self-reflective lyricism.

From Colorways by Andrew Brenza

Colorways provides strong critical and interpretive prose support via an introduction by Snodgrass and a preface by Brenza. Kristine Snodgrass writes, “This work is… colorful and hopeful in the way it pairs the written words and digitally altered ‘new’ concrete poetry.”

Snodgrass writes, “[Brenza’s book] is what this Visual Poetry Series attempts to prove: that practitioners today, whether new to the field, or prolific producers, are expeditiously moving to break boundaries, gatekeeping and definitions.”

From Colorways by Andrew Brenza

In his preface, Brenza states Colorways is an attempt to answer the question: “How does one write a lyric poem adequate to this age?”

For this reader, Colorways is an instant neo-concrete classic opening the door to new possibilities of poetic form and genre. The use of Ekphrasis is so innovative in Brenza’s book that I recommend visual poets do their own explorations of this classic form.

(De Villo Sloan is director of the Winifred & De Villo Sloan, Jr. Charitable Fund.)

From Colorways by Andrew Brenza