Lenore M. Myers
Lenore M. Myers
Lenore M. Myers’s award-winning poems and essays have appeared in Southern Indiana Review, LIT, The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Regards to Balthus, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2019. Mostly from Oakland, California, Lenore M. Myers now lives in the north Bay Area, where she teaches ESL, Citizenship Preparation, and writing.
Myers’s first full-length collection, Afterimages, will be released in 2026 by Sixteen Rivers Press.
Afterimages
“The poems in Lenore Myers’s debut collection Afterimages explore the complex interactions between artist and subject, including the darker implications of aesthetic “mastery”—manipulation, cooptation, objectification, even abuse—in which the artist strives to “capture the soul” of a subject, confine it in a frame, and offer it to the public as a salable commodity. Myers’s poems seek to break the confining frame and to restore the reified self to the dynamic, if destabilizing, dance of becoming. And as if that weren’t plenty (it is), she also recognizes how her own practice as poet relates to an artist’s originating efforts, placing her subjects and herself in the “little rooms” of her stanzas. If you want to know how art can make a difference in our lives, read these poems.”
—John Canaday, author of Critical Assembly: Poems of the Manhattan Project
“Conventional forms of ekphrasis are often little more than poetic descriptions of art. But there is nothing conventional about Lenore Myers’s Afterimages. The poems in this fabulous collection go beyond description, beyond the page, beyond the canvas, beyond looking and seeing, beyond interpretation and reflection, beyond decoding. They participate in what we might call an expanded ekphrasis that takes the dialogue between art and poetry to new levels of interactivity. This is a book that asks big questions about how we perceive and process the acts of making art and engaging with its aftereffects.”
—Dean Rader, author of Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly
Poems
The Triangular Field at One. Published October 9, 2022.
Commentary on “The Triangular Field” by Mike Rivera at Bare Patches. Published February 26, 2026.
Five poems after Balthus at The Ekphrastic Review. Published October 20, 2023.
On “Elizabeth Bishop and the Management of Distance” at Shadowgraph Magazine.
As Jay DeFeo Paints at LIT.