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2002 |
Separate Parts (Pivotal Prose Series)
On New York's Lower East Side, the 1960s are just beginning. Separate Parts (Six Memory Pieces) explores a world of committed, vibrant, and insistently independent artists and writers struggling for freedom from the social limitations of that time. Beginning with her own life and that of her husband, poet/painter Basil King, Martha King doesn't gloss over the personal and political contradictions of the era; the struggles she describes are both heroic and deeply flawed. She shows that even on this rebellious frontier, one doesn't have to look far to find the seeds of contemporary corporate New York. Nevertheless, Separate Parts celebrates a world in which many people believed, often at desperate cost, in the power of art to transform the world. "...the analogy King draws between the "junk" of the human genome and the contribution artists make to society is at the center of SEPARATE PARTS...[it is] written with lucidity, vigor and charm. Familiar names--denizens of Manhattan's lower east side and Greenwich Village--come and go in Martha's world, people like LeRoi Jones (before being reborn as Amiri Baraka), Leo Castelli. Mark Rothko and Philip Guston. Altogether they form the vibrating sympathetic strings out of which King creates, with a few deft touches, the counterpoints and episodes of the creative life in New York...a blend of mystery and candor, measure and benediction." --John
Olson, Rain Taxi. |
