#rachel cusk

[alwaysbeenjessica]

getting back into things

[quotespile]

The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it. True art means seeking to capture the unreal.

Rachel Cusk, Second Place

[finisconoratopus]

[litsnaps]

[garadinervi]

Vija Celmins, Edited by Theodora Vischer and James Lingwood, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel / Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin, 2025 [Art: © Vija Celmins]

Texts: Julian Bell, Jimena Canales, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Marlene Dumas, Katie Farris, Robert Gober, Ilya Kaminsky, Glenn Ligon, James Lingwood, Andrew Winer

Graphic Design: Teo Schifferli

Exhibition: Vija Celmins, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, June 15 – September 21, 2025

[laputalashline]

"A life with no story was not, in the end, a life that I could live."

Rachel Cusk, from 'Outline'

[ars-theurgia]

Art, rooted in insanity, transforms itself through process into sanity: it is matter, the body, that is insane.

(Rachel Cusk)

[loneberry]

“If she’s like most poets, Mauro said, she suspects that what she does is entirely useless, not because it’s a luxury but in the sense that a spider’s web hanging in the corner of a room is useless. Everyone ignores the spider’s web, which nonetheless required enormous persistence and patience to make and yet can be brushed away in an instant without anyone noticing. No one notices poetry, he said, but when they find it and look closely at it they see something marvellous, like the spider’s web. The spider’s web has nothing to do with history or politics or oppression, he said, it exists in a different reality from those things and is obviously much weaker and more fragile than they are. It is more linked to survival than to power or violence – it survives in spite of them. It can be brushed away and all that work wasted, but then the work starts again, in another corner of the room.”

—Rachel Cusk, Parade

Poetry’s gratuitousness is precisely why it’s so lovable. The poet is a species of animal that should have gone extinct long ago. And yet, like the manatee, we persist… as lumbering anachronisms.

Finished reading Cusk’s new book (before its official release, thanks to an FSG editor who offered me a review copy… I read her last book Second Place the day it came out)…and it’s good.