MixedHyperallergicShe seems to have taken a tangent into a project that is, to all appearances, less personal than her earlier work. Using a bulletproof persona that admits of no vulnerability, she has produced an odd sort of period piece ... Almost every line in the book—except the ones that refer directly to poetry, or that employ four-letter words that would never have been permitted under the Hayes Code—sounds like it could have been lifted from the hard-boiled repartee from some detective flick of the ’40s or ’50s, or else one of the tougher screwball comedies ... This is Minnis’s reinvention of an atmosphere that feels déjà vu but that she’s conjured out of echoes and resonances. It’s a pre-Mad Men world in which a man is likely to be a rat, a heel, or a louse, and a woman might be a gold digger, maybe even a stinker, and likes to be given jewelry and mink; in which things are ritzy and people go to blazes or feel swell, and what everyone’s after is dough ... It’s all about reading, I think. The book’s \'I\' represents the poet as such, and \'you,\' anyone who reads the poem; it’s an endless dance of attraction and alienation between text and reader. And though the poems are not that heavy, they have some killer lines in them ... Does Minnis’s attraction/repulsion ploy work? Up to a point. But I’d have appreciated a more condensed sequence. As with any stormy, ambivalent relationship, which includes reading, the ups and downs, push and pull that at first seemed exciting can end up feeling monotonous.
Pamela Bannos
PositiveHyperallergic...Pamela Bannos, has trawled through the archives to find new facts and clear up misunderstandings. Most importantly, she examined as much of Maier’s work as she could get her hands on in order to trace her movements, sometimes minute by minute... It’s amazing how a researcher as assiduous as Bannos has been unable to find a single person who ever had a serious conversation with Maier about her art, nor to find any written reflections...subtly implies, there are really two stories here, and the tangled story of the afterlife — that is, of what happened after her storage spaces were seized and sold off and her work was shepherded into the public sphere that she had always avoided — takes up half the book ... The most important lesson of Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife is that Maier’s pictures still hold much more to be seen.
