Product Description
Henry Darger was an untrained artist and a social isolate who was obsessed with little girls. When he died in Chicago in 1973 at the age of 81, his work was completely unknown. Now his work is hung in major international art galleries and his innovative use of materials places him in the pop art milieu. The poems in this book tell the story of his life.
What the critics said about Linen Tough As History:
“Chevalier demonstrates a love of the comic and an admirable facility for wordplay. She revels in finding odd junctures, in coming at her subjects sidelong and with a raised eyebrow. Her style is fresh, incisive and she has a deft ability to nuance her poems with an impressive tonal range and an eye for weird personal and social milieus, finding imagery and syntax to match.” — Judith Beveridge
“Chevalier's fine-tuned ear makes her poems enjoyably fluent and direct, their observational stance driven by restless interest in the world around her and its linguistic and formal mediation.” — Kate Lilley
Julie Chevalier was born in New Jersey and came to Sydney in 1965. She is the author of the short story collection Permission to Lie (2011) and the poetry collection Linen Tough as History (2012). Darger: his girls won the 2011 Alec Bolton Prize for best unpublished manuscript. http://juliechevalier.net.
REVIEWS
“…The result is a finely tuned collection of poems that, with extraordinary empathy, tries to understand a man who could reasonably be regarded as having been mentally ill for most of his life, yet who also held down a regular job as janitor and hospital attendant.”
GEOFF PAGE, The Australian
