“A beautiful book that evokes Cornell’s artistic spirit.” — Arthur Danto, Harper’s Bazaar In Dime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic reflects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America’s great artists. Simic’s spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for which Cornell is justly renowned. “Dime-Store Alchemy is the most sustained literary response thus far to Cornell’s boxes, montages, and films. Incisive, freewheeling, dramatic. A mixture of evocation and observation, as lucid and shadowy as the imagination it celebrates. Dime-Store Alchemy is a meeting of kindred spirits that is itself a work of art.” —Edward Hirsch, The New Yorker “Neither a straightforward critical account of Cornell’s art nor a merely literary embellishment of it, but rather a parallel text, Simic’s book mingles biography and criticism with selections from the artist’s notebooks and includes poems and reminiscences of his own as well as quotes from a variety of other writers. Simic’s approach develops the plain detail of Cornell’s life and illuminates the nature of his work.” — Publishers Weekly
Author
U.S. Poet Laureate, 2007-2008 Dušam Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. Simic’s childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963. Simic is the author of more than 30 poetry collections, including The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1989), which received the Pulitzer Prize; Jackstraws (1999); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize; and Scribbled in the Dark (2017). He is also an essayist, translator, editor, and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught for over 30 years. Simic has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His other honors and awards include the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Translation Prize. He served as the 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2001. Simic has also been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
