Endnotes by Kelly Terwilliger

Kelly Terwilliger’s Endnotes: a poem, illustrations, and notes, comprises an initial poem, a series of seventeen beautiful watercolor paintings that illustrate and incorporate the poem’s lines, and a final section of “notes” where a thumbnail of each painting inspires a generous gloss.  But this description does not begin to convey the originality and spellbinding complexity of what the author/artist has described as a “poem journey.” Page after page, I marvel at how the visual poem reads and translates and plays descant to the initial poem, and then how the endnotes weave together those earlier words and images into a fabric of response, memory and reflection, question and association, the lyrical, the philosophical, the photographic, the etymological…..  This is quite simply a wonderful book—in the most expansive sense of that term. It is magical and delightfully curious (wondering and strange); it is playful but also very moving and deeply serious. And this is not surprising since the whole idea of gloss and notes is enacted in these pages as a vital vibrant processing—breathing (life) into the poem, the reading, the reflections. As the book reads and rereads itself, I am drawn into a world of signs and meanings, where everything is both container and contained. I find myself both outside (admiring) and inside (having walked right into the world and words and images of the story). I am there with the tree of shoes, the basketball court, the huddle, the little goats coming down from the hills, images that are now living inside me. With this lovely book, Kelly Terwilliger, brilliant oral storyteller, poet and artist, has given us an exquisite gift.

–Karen McPherson, author of Skein of Light and translator of Louise Duprè’s Tout près.

In Endnotes, a single poem unfolds into illustrations, which unfold again into notes, into subnotes, into footnotes. These tendrils, all connected to the same source, are full of observations, anecdotes, myths, translations, and quotes that meditate on everything from dirigibles to football huddles, from hummingbird nests to hieroglyphics. Endnotes is a map of these obscured relationships and connections, of the “realms of roots we don’t see and easily forget until they break our surface.” As Terwilliger writes, “Isn’t this a good game? Everything can become another kind of something else.” It is a good game, and this book is a guide to help us learn to play.

–Jennifer Perrine, author of Beautiful Outlaw and Again