Be Still: Poems for Kay Sage

-Katie Manning, Author of Hereverent

Kay Sage might be the most underappreciated and overlooked artist of the 20th century. Be Still makes a case for Sage's relevance and genius more compellingly than any work of art criticism could. Nadia Arioli's book fully inhabits Sage's surreal landscapes, with each poem providing a map and compass for navigating the aesthetic pleasures and unconscious desires that haunted her canvases. [. . .] Arioli crafts a fluid symbiosis where Sage's vision pollinates Arioli's words [. . .] By the end of the book, it is impossible to ever view a Kay Sage painting again without hearing Arioli's voice echoing through the brushstrokes.

-Chase Dimock, Managing Editor of As It Ought To Be Magazine and Author of Sentinel Species

In Be Still, Arioli channels the paintings and life of Kay Sage to explore the oddity, the beauty, and the danger of living. In these surreal and tender poems, the speaker can be "the key that goes nowhere . . . the list in your pocket, the shrieks of a maid." [. . .] Here things have teeth. But through all the pain and strangeness, connection is the most valued commodity. Arioli writes, "I am trying to learn tenderness," and these poems are a primer for the rest of us trying to do the same.

-Donna Vorreyer, Author of To Everything There Is