Disturbing Muses
by Mike Allen

Description:
"I have said, I think, that these poems are interpretations of what the poet sees on the canvas. I add that they are imaginary biographies, as true as anything that actually happened: they are biographies written the other way around, from the evidence of the art. Pablo Picasso's relationship with women, for instance, as when

he left her a twisted, flattened shell,
curled like wet canvas on his padded chair,
mouth soundlessly screaming
from the same side of her face
that both eyes now started from.

Isn't that, don't you think it is, the way it (actually, metaphorically, what's the difference) happened?"
— from the Introduction by Theodora Goss