Travel Is a State of Mind

Travel is a State of Mind by Brad Fairchild and Larry Corse is an exuberant poignant and often powerful volume of poems and photographs. Inspired by a month touring in Europe with friends the poems bring to life moments of 1000 years of history and the ever-ephemeral present. In small miracles of image they capture incidents from the lives of the painters-Pieter Breughel Egon Schiele-as well as glimpses like your head bobbing on the crowd like Marie Antoinettes or a stained glass portrait of a medieval monarch barking commands through painted glass lips-wide-eyed and grimy. Many of these portraits go deftly beneath the surface of the art and monuments the writers visit-Empress Maria-Teresa of Austria suspended live in her coffin the self-consciousness of a boy being painted nude by Anton Kolig furtive lovers having coitus on a bicycle on a bridge at night in Amsterdam. But also the poems show us the ever-disappearing surface with its luminous mundane mystery-a ripped settee cushion at the Hotel Jeanne dArc an old man in Munich dragging a mattress upstairs. The photos and cover art by Christopher McCarra give an unusually strong enhancement to the poems. The overall effect of the book is arresting-a surprising and powerfully felt sense of the richness of life its perpetual mingling of past and present-lovely baffling stern and uncompromising. -Linda Taylor poet Corse and Fairchild have successfully created a lively narrative that is at once colorful suggestive and incredibly engaging. They offer us a collection of transient moments in time masterfully woven together in a charming and remarkably intimate lyrical tapestry. A truly delightful read that not only captures the allure and romance of the journey but also offers a brilliant insight into the consciousness of the traveler. - Oliver Self Fairchild and Corse send gilded greetings from some of Europes most dazzling cities. Their poems are the interiors of picture postcards often mirroring each other. They take us beneath the senses to those jeweled chambers where we feel what we see. For anyone who has ever been seduced by Old World charms these poems will carry you back like a beloved souvenir. - Franklin Abbott author of Mortal Love: Selected Poems and editor of Boyhood: Growing Up Male.