Description

These black and white photographs and poems reveal the cultural geography of a vanishing America, using images of New Jersey that look back to a place in our collective memory: old state highways, greasy roadside diners, abandoned movie theaters, the vanishing Main Streets of Woolworth's five and dimes and of post-industrial inner-cities. It is an unusual collection in that the photographer is also a poet who documents the beauty amid the desolation of rust-belt America. In both verbal and visual imagery, Hillringhouse gives us a shadowed world caught between elegy and silence and that moves us from vastness to intimacy. Between Frames weaves family history, personal guilt, feelings of loss with meditations on the strangeness of being in a world fraught with beauty and decay. As the poet Gerald Stern says in his blurb, "The absolute sadness of America is in these poems and these photographs; and all the old hopes and dreams--and the rage--scattered throughout..." And as the writer Phillip Lopate states in his blurb, "...they conjure another world, shadowy and haunted, a royal vision lurking just beyond the everyday, like de Chirico's streetscapes."