by C. S. Giscombe (Author), Judith Margolis (Author)
“Giscombe and Margolis compose their travelogue in the present-absence of tender doubt. ‘Power’s always locatable on the other side of the mountain, distant,’ but Giscombe activates the line and the sequence to articulate poems that range far while simultaneously enfolding near. Margolis answers with sketches that are always more than their figures, because the seen bring their own annotations to their rendering. See that, the artist says. Hear that, the poet says. But they know the trains come and go like italics on the says.” -- Farid Matuk, author of The Real Horse
“Reading Train Music, the collaboration between the African-American poet Giscombe and the Jewish-American artist Margolis, I find myself swaying in tune with the train on the curving irregular tracks. The book is an account of the friends’ four-day journey from New York to San Francisco. While Giscombe evokes cultural and personal history in the passing geography, Margolis wrestles a moody insomnia with layered collages and drawings of the very landscape that Giscombe catalogs. The divergent responses of the poet and the artist to their shared experience create a tantalizing and graphic mix of poetry, image, and prose but what feeds the creative explorations of both Giscombe and Margolis is their unknowing. Discovery is deferred and the book flows forward.” -- Gilah Yelin Hirsch, California State University, Domingues Hills
A poet and a book artist take a train across the United States, creating and conversing along the way.
Late in the fall of 2017, poet C. S. Giscombe and book artist Judith Margolis boarded an Amtrak train in New York City and, four days later, stepped off another train at the edge of San Francisco Bay. Giscombe was returning home to California to address an all-white audience on the problem of white supremacy, and expatriate Margolis, accustomed to a somewhat solitary existence, was visiting the United States and making collages. Traveling together, they each turned their train quarters into writing and drawing “studios” where they engaged in conversations and arguments and shared experiences of the discomforts and failures of recent times.
Their original intention had been to travel west and document, in journals and sketchpads, the complex, charged American landscape, but as the trip progressed—and in the months afterwards—the project took on a new shape. Train Music, the book that resulted, recollects and explores the century’s racial and gendered conflicts—sometimes sensually, sometimes in stark images, sometimes in a “mixed economy” of poetry and prose.
ISBN: 978-1632430885
