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“If / pleasure is an ending, then surely we are / joined,” Jory Mickelson writes, in Picturing, where the viewer melds with the art, the gaze moves between and beyond, exposing a sorrow inside desire’s hinge. From Marilyn Monroe to Icarus, Paul Cadmus to “the angel’s ruffling wings,” these poems shift the lines between longing and conquest, childhood and history, an open wound and a painter’s caress. Reveling in beauty and damage, this is a book that sings and singes.

—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door

About the Author: Jory Mickelson is an award-winning writer and educator living in Xwot?qom / Bellingham on the homelands of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. They are the author of three books of poetry: Picturing (2025), All This Divide (2024), and Wilderness//Kingdom (2019), which won a 2020 High Plains Book Award. Usually found in the moss and mud of the Pacific Northwest, this summer they are an Open AiR MT resident at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives.