Self-Portraits by John Beall

John Beall counsels his reader to “curl your dreams from coral,” and that is what he, himself, does in Self-Portraits. With language both suggestive and candid, Beall draws the reader into the emotional depths of private life and the public events that sometimes percolate through a family’s story. Through powerful juxtapositions of family moments and historical events—Beall’s great grandfather draping the Lincoln house in mourning crepe in 1865; his daughter painting a self-portrait with “Joni Mitchell eyes”; and Beall at school “trying to block students’ access to TV” on September 11, 2001l—Beall dares us to rethink the boundary between poetry and memoir.

–Mary Catherine Harper, author of Some Gods Don’t Need Saints and recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in Poetry

John Beall’s poems remind us that self-portraits are not just resemblances, but revelations of the places, loves, losses, questions that keep making us who we are.  Beall evokes great teachers of seeing: his daughter with her “unadorned streaks of pencil;” his grandmother with her quilted “Quatrefoils of colored rings;” Rembrandt, with his “smudges of lust.”  Like them, Beall knows how to savor both the surface of his art and what’s beneath—a pleasure he makes palpable in these keenly observed, lively, and deeply felt poems.

–Lynn Powell, Season of the Second Thought