A studio visit means an excuse to prepare by brushing up on the artist prior to the visit. This means research, you know what that is, how a brainiac pronounces procrastination. In anticipation of a visit this Monday with Stephanie Brooks, I can here and now recommend, just in time for Valentine’s Day (What is that you just said?), Ms. Brooks’ recent Love Is a Certain Kind of Flower, published by the fine folk(s) at Green Lantern Press.

Stephanie Brooks, Love is a Certain Kind of Flower

Ms. Brooks has been known for sculptures that mingle a certain institutional display or delivery of decidedly not institutional thoughts and language. Sometimes the works literalize metaphor, at other times reinterpret abstract forms, and maybe even bring about ridiculous attempts to quantify and advertise those things we get nervous about being quantified and directed. You know, the kind of answer you just do not want to hear or read right now.

Stephanie Brooks, Triple X, XO

With this book we get possibly the most in-depth of Brooks’ many odes to the wooly byways of the heart. Over the course of 36 poems, what the gauche might mistake for lists, love is extolled in its many splendid and resourceful forms: a bed of roses, peaches, leopards, honey, (unspecified) stone, shocking fuzz, a lumbering cart, et cetera. Tempting as it is to see the mark of irony and cynicism in Brooks’ taxonomic treatment of the predictable and not-so-predictable manifestations of love, this is not a tossing into the trash bin of love and its metaphors. For one thing, it is impossible not to get a smile and feel a warm swelling on the inside even in the book’s more pointed moments (sharp arrows, barbed hooks, iron wedges and the like).

I need to take a touch of umbrage with the editors of this fine collection. They’d like us to believe: “To say a thing is as red as a rose is as misleading as a phrase like ‘I changed my mind’ or ‘I couldn’t believe my ears.’ And yet these things, embedded as they are in a cultural landscape tradition do in fact convey a necessary and essential meaning.” Now maybe I just fell off the turnip truck, but to me that is one mighty big “and yet.” I’d argue these phrases and metaphors are not misleading at all, are in fact quite exacting and telling. Furthermore, the fact that Ms. Brooks’ book is ridiculously broad in the items, moods, places and times that love is, likes, plays, smells, has, constitutes, and the such, and still this collection is nowhere close to exhaustive, reminds us that on a quick level it is easy to think love is one thing. This is our mistake and the fault of three dozen too many romantic comedies and sensitive indie rockers. (For the sake of argument let’s let Al Green and Sade off the hook for the moment.) Love is precisely all things listed in this book for each and every one of us. And secretly we know it. Only our well-oiled coping mechanisms make us try and forget the times that love was like a bat.

Stephanie Brooks, Untitled (metaphors for love)

Maybe the editors forgot what Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote for us: “There is a great deal of difference between still believing something and again believing it. Still to believe that the moon influences the plants betrays stupidity and superstition, but again to believe it displays philosophy and reflection.” To which, Ms. Brooks has provided an easy to reference collection of categories—in that time-honored format the poem—needed to again express my heart whenever, say, I change my mind and decide that my love is, say, a resplendent raisin.

Get this book for those you love, and those you’ll love in the future. And fast! Only 250 copies. Otherwise you’ll just be left to love the one (book) you’re with.

(by Anthony Elms)