“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