Rage: The Misery of Men :: Hope: The Dawning of Men
Reviews & Testimonials
On John Tomlinson :
"There is light but there is also image, and together, beaming with intent, John Tomlinson’s drawings reach across the room to see if you are paying attention. Existing on a translucent substrate, the drawings are forever skating, hovering, floating with emotion – their rendering is not about the surface in which they inhabit, but the environment they continually animate; and they are moving, with action, sometimes absent from a body, away and against the invisible and the implied."
Suzanne Bybee, Independent Art Writer © August 2015
On Karen Morris :
"The meters are strong and the pain wincing.
I hear echoes of Celtic battle songs...also the drum of Dharani, the Buddhist chants proclaiming our connection to ancient lineages and all suffering beings."
- from the Forward by Mark Finn
Cataclysm and Other Arrangements;
poetry of Kagayaki Karen Morris
Rage: The Misery of Men::Hope:The Dawning of Men Is a Remarkable Cultural Achievement
By Dominique Nahas • Art Critic and Curator • New York, August 16, 2016
RAGE :The Misery of Men : : HOPE : The Dawning of Men bring together in the form of this limited-edition book a remarkable duo of artistic poet and poetic artist! Poet and psycho-analyst Karen Morris's vibrant text alternates between soulful introspective tenderness and vituperative rage blends marvelously with visual artist and educator John Tomlinson's drawings that are induced by graphite stick and digital stylus, both. Tomlinson's mark making and imagery plunge us into the depths of his self-reflections and self-disclosures. Tomlinson's visual work alternates between mordant self portraits and a flurry of word+image poems, this part logorrheic / part glossolaic verbal stream + images have neck-bracing emotional velocity. Tomlinson's work is unique in its combinatory power. It recalls the incantatory textual-visual work of the likes of Antonin Artaud, Nancy Spero, Tracy Emin, William Kentridge ( and in terms of intensity reminds us also of the fierce Visionary Heads of William Blake). Karen Morris's poetry reminds me of a blend of the elegaic phrasings of Reynolds Price, with the scrappy invocations of the late, great poet Paula Rankin mixed in with the fierce-edged glinty sharpness of Charles Bukowski. The emotional truths uttered, evoked and "unconcealed" in this book provide emotional, intellectual and psychical nourishment;
RAGE:HOPE is a combined literary marvel and a sensory milestone.
By Marcia Nehemiah • Poet, Writer • Hawley, Pennsylvania, August 22, 2016
Emily Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
The poems and the drawings in Rage: The Misery of Men, not only have the effect of unsettling me and shaking my comfortable delusions, but this dynamic and energetic conversation between Tomlinson’s drawings and Morris’ poems also wrenches tears from my heart. Morris striking use of language expands the emotions evinced by Tomlinson’s haunting images, and the images reinforce the depth of the poems. The physical object of the book itself is a work of art. Don’t skip Morris’ Afterword stating the crucial point that the misery of men exists alongside the misery of women.