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CIRQUE You come with all your tools, dump brush, wrench hammer head, trowel, spoon, sponge and clamp…
A dictionary, pen n pad, and an open arty appetite could all serve as guiding radar gadgets, but readers need not bring a single thing when they settle into their first (or fifth) read of Mark Making. All parts are
included in this sovereign collection. As I stretch out of its trance and return to full upright and locked position, I imagine the book as a pouch of phonic gems stitched into a parachute, an open-bar beverage cart too narrow to ever bump an elbow, a spanning sky spun inverted so chrome clouds clumped in a curve conjure nevershadowed crystal coastline.
Review by Mike Burwell
The Magic of Mariachi, by Steven and Reefka Schneider WingsPress, San Antonio, TX, 2016
With the ongoing and official government assault on America’s southern borderlands, Steven and Reefka Schneider’s book The Magic of Mariachi / La Magia del Mariachi forges a necessary corrective to this mean-spirited rhetoric. It is a stunning ekphrastic
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Reefka Schneider
Reefka
collaboration that merges Reefka Schneider’s dazzling portraits of borderland mariachi musicians with Steven’s poignant and pointed responses to these images. Their collaborative work has appeared before in the pages of Cirque; in fact, Steve’s poem “The Long Camino” along with Reefka’s full page image of the same name premiered in the Winter Solstice 2014 issue (Vol. 6, No. 1) and presaged the book’s publication by WingsPress in 2016. The Magic of Mariachi could also be called the bookend to their ongoing work blending visual image and poetry about southern borderland culture. Their first collaboration, Borderlines: Drawing Border Lives, featured