Beauty is an unstable force. It gathers mysteriously even out of its absence, beginning as a transparent sheen, little more than a certain perception of moisture. Out of ugliness even. Like a mold it grows, then like a moss; suddenly it's covered in little petals. It coheres, burgeons, builds, drifts. Shapes form and pile, almost tumble, look as if to tumble, hold, tumble more; the mechanism is crystalline. It loves itself, beauty. It consists almost entirely of love of itself. It burgeons with the force of love of itself into a dozen, a hundred, a thousand petals, and the petals harden into facets, a thousand facets, facet upon facet, all glinting and flashing for one another, for the benefit of one another's praise.

Baroque is a collection of three essays exploring the arc between nature and artifice. The first essay, On Nature Writing, is a meditation on the rhythms of the natural world and its fundamental insusceptibility to the bonds of human language. Doctrine of the Affections, an essay in images, uses collage to juxtapose the natural and the built environment, photographic and painterly realities, the material present and the mirage of the historical. Baroque considers the decorative impulse as it pertains to the history of Western art and architecture as well as conceptions of female beauty, posing the question: What is really going on at the surface?

Baroque is the fourth in a series of artist books to be published by Holly Myers through then/and publications, after Road Noise, Wild Rough Country and Heidelberg. These works combine images and text to explore ideas, impressions and themes in their raw state. The series serves as a fluid compositional space, intuitive and exploratory rather than declarative, in which to reckon with the substance of contemporary life.

History is like tapestry. History is like compost. History is like a roadmap through time, only seen in reverse; or a thoughtmap laid over time (whatever that is) in retrospect. There are lines, there are paths, there are tangled threads, but there is also compaction and lithification. And there is also space. Five hundred years of time is vast and vacant. It is full of forgetting. Forgetting is the erosion of the matter of the world in a process sympathetic to the erosion of matter in the brain. History is a certain kind of space, then, with certain paths through, certain threads, with certain compaction simultaneously.

Heidelberg is the third book in Holly Myers series, including the titles Road Noise and Wild Rough Country all from then/and.

Wild Rough Country / Right to Pretty Heroines / Birds
By Holly Myers

A two-lane highway channels into a four-lane no man's land toward Main Street. Wide, empty medians. A confusion of frontage roads. At the Family Dollar, a young woman stands alone in line with a bag of Cheetos and a child's t-shirt on a hanger that reads My Day Begins At Noon in pink glitter letters.

A tax service, a truck repair, auto parts, tacos, a drivetrain specialist, a county health office, a liquor store. A church in a warehouse with a swing set outside.

A Cylindrical Object on Fire in the Dark is a collection of short stories and prose works that explores the elemental aspects of storytelling--from word to sentence to character to gesture to narrative. It is concerned with the question of why words do what they do, why sentences do what they do, and why humans do what they do.

Holly Myers is a writer, critic and curator currently based in New Mexico. Her fiction has appeared in the Antioch Review, Zyzzyva and Joyland. Her story The Guest House was anthologized in New California Writing 2012 (Heyday) and an excerpt of her first novel was published in Gen F: An Anthology of Short Stories for the Comic Tragedies of Our Times, edited by Gordy Grundy. Her art writing and criticism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, the New York Times, Art Review, Art + Auction and Modern Painters, among other publications. She is the co-editor of Rabble, an imprint of Insert Blanc Press that aims to foster innovative critical writing.

A Cylindrical Object on Fire in the Dark is a collection of short fiction exploring the elemental aspects of storytelling--from word to sentence to character to gesture to narrative. In the roughly two dozen works that make up the book, Myers is attentive to the operations of words: how it is that words collude into sentences, and sentences balloon into worlds. Of equal concern are the operations of people: how people use these words, whether to shape, accommodate, resist or deny the realities with which they contend; how they make sense of where they find themselves; in what erratic or desperate manner they strive; what they get right and where they go wrong. These works ask how do words, sentences and humans behave in the face of war, ghosts, extreme weather, motherhood, alien possession, insect infestations, love, grief, or violence.

Holly Myers is a great writer --Llyn Foulkes

My view of reality exploded while reading A Cylindrical Object on Fire in the Dark. Myers taps into abstract feelings and existential angst with wit and eloquence, offering a twisted, but somehow elegant, picture of our existence. --Analia Saban

A Cylindrical Object on Fire in the Dark is as visually evocative and enigmatic as its title. Myers' prose resembles a film of a mythical and very difficult road trip, a series of mini and maxi dramas, deeply moving and touching down somewhere beyond narrative, where the silences are as meaningful as the words. --Lucy R. Lippard

I still remember first reading Holly Myers' art writing, it was infused with such rich and visceral description, such resonant conceptual observation. In A Cylindrical Object on Fire in the Dark, her introspection and invention of new structures gives voice to an honesty far out of reach to most of us. These short pieces grab and awaken us to the ever present truth of being human, both in relationship to others and to ourselves. They ignite our awareness of the profoundly vivid reality of everyday life. A Cylindrical Object on Fire in the Dark is a brave exploration into what is possible within the short story structure. Myers' creativity is on full display and the result is a hauntingly honest work of art that illuminates what it means to be truly awake in the everyday. --Uta Barth

Holly Myers is a writer and critic based in New Mexico. Her fiction has appeared in the Antioch Review, Zyzzyva and Joyland. Her art writing and criticism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly and Art Review, among other publications.

Sleeping, highway noises.

The sunlight slid across the surface of the wild

yellow grass.

The wild space, the sky.

There was a storefront for rent in a small town.

Road Noise is a collection of three short works exploring the mass, texture, and character of the American landscape. The title work, Road Noise, is an incantatory tribute to the open road, a tour of the wide, wild West. Marine considers the westernmost edge of the continent--specifically, the maritime commerce of a Pacific Northwest port town--and that fateful point of contact between the land and the sea. Memory Exercise explores the intimate overlay of landscape, memory and music.

Road Noise is the first in a new series of artist books to be published by Holly Myers through then/and publications. These works combine images and text to explore ideas, impressions and themes in their raw state. The series is intended to serve as a fluid compositional space, intuitive and open to spontaneity.

Road Noise

Holly Myers

Available in Paperback, 120 p.

ISBN: 978-1-947322-92-9