Pullman
JoAnne McFarland’s Pullman examines themes of labor and love, using as its backdrop the history of the treatment of the Pullman car porters of the late 19th century. The poems and art pieces in this collection both reflect on and interact with cultural and historical sources, from the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs to the creative output of the poet and artist’s late father, a musician and songwriter for Aretha Franklin. With urgency, and without apology, Pullman underscores the relationships between the events of our American past and of our present.
This collection includes sixteen full color reproductions of McFarland’s collage pieces. The audiobook version is narrated by the author in collaboration with designer and voice artist Schuyler Grant.
“ A poet as sensitive to the visual possibilities of poems as she is the sonic and allusive, McFarland’s poems are often bookmatched with their own erasures, as though run through a magnetic imaging device to reveal their hidden, and often startling, currents.
JoAnne McFarland offers the body in thrall, in love, the body etched by ritual, by shame, the Black body, the female body, the body fully human.
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About the Poet & Artist
JoAnne McFarland is an artist, poet, and curator. Her poetry collections include: Acid Rain published by Willow Books, Identifying the Body published by The Word Works, and Tracks of My Tears, a multimedia collection also published by The Word Works in 2020. JoAnne's artworks are part of the permanent collections of The Library of Congress, The Columbus Museum of Art, The Department of State, and Ikon Corporation among others. Recent exhibitions include: Best & Brightest and The Indivisible Spectrum, both at The Painting Center in New York City. JoAnne is the Artistic Director of Artpoetica Project Space in Brooklyn which exhibits work that focuses on the intersection of language and visual representation.
