Abstraction
With the lush Pacific Northwest as a backdrop, a famous artist abruptly changes her painting style and finds her art has an eerie impact on people. Wren Willow Hendrix’s new work provokes inexplicable personality changes in those who view it, with often hilarious results. All too soon, Wren finds herself the center of unwanted attention.
“Abstraction, Sam Weis’s hallucinatory romp of a novel, imagines a world where sins, hatreds and even physical wounds are cured whenever an unsuspecting viewer, no matter how seeming repugnant, gazes upon the paintings of Wren Willow Hendrix. Wren had been a satisfyingly successful landscape painter, but once she begins painting abstractly, urged on by her talented painter friend Julia Burlow, things begin to unravel. Or to heal. In any case, once her paintings are unleashed, even the fish in the sea are affected.
Her paintings induce life-changing responses in everyone who sees them, triggering, along the way, love, murder, arson, kidnapping, miraculous recovery and some subsistence farming.
There are plenty of great lines and laughs along the way, as you would expect from a wordsmith and observer of people with Weis’ pedigree.
If everyone in the world reads Abstraction, it could well be a different world.”
-Dan Bern
Chapbooks
The Unburdening
What petty slights
And jealousies drive us
What self-righteous indignations
Brought us here to this astounding moment
We once held the world in our hands
Turning it, examining its
Every mountain and chasm
There to find such affection
Is it just time
The accumulation of years
Realization of desires
Bearing witness to the harm we have caused
I stand and shout
Let go of memory
And be as curious children
Fall in love with all of it once again
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River Like A Mirror
Below the spillway this river is swift
Above the spillway the river has paused
Its visage frozen, its true life submerged
Beneath a shield of ice
That shines like a mirror
And like Narcissus I peer
From the bridge and see
Not my face looking down
Nor fish gazing up
But the whole of the sky
Looking down at itself
For miles and miles and miles
Snaking through the farms
And the post office towns
Pleased to be floating high above
To see its own clouds
Like a waving hand
In a blue-green glove
Music
May we never doubt
The importance of music
For our beating hearts