BROKEN ROOMS: Sculpture in 12 Months of Haiku

Broken Rooms is the haiku of Ellis Avery in conversation with the sculptures of William Corwin.

Avery wrote one haiku a day over the course of a year, charting the daily, the seasonal, the spatial, the personal, and the eternal. Corwin's sculptures echo her poems' preoccupations with loss and space. Together they relate a presence that has passed and a past that is eerily present. Old pier. Late sun gilds the gray wood gold. You are still not tired of beauty. ELLIS AVERY is the author of the novels The Last Nude (Riverhead 2012) and The Teahouse Fire (2007). The Last Nude was the winner of the Goldie Award for Historical Fiction and the Stonewall Book Award and was featured in O, More, Curve, and more. The Teahouse Fire was the winner of the Lambda Literary Award, a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award. Avery's book of poetry The Smoke Week was published to acclaim by Gival Press in 2003, and her essay, The Sapphire and the Tooth was published in 2015 as a Kindle Single. Avery is a graduate of the MFA program at Goddard College. She has taught English Literature at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley.