Brad Fairchild

Travel is a State of Mind: Poems from Another Month Abroad Brad Fairchild

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 Antoinette's", 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 d'Arc, 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 Europe's most dazzling