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When I think of Tumblr, and of Trisha Low, I think of sitting on the Caltrain on vacation in the summer of 2015, scrolling through Tumblr on my phone and seeing the last essay in Low’s “On Being-Hated” series for SFMOMA’s Open Space magazine. I remember reading around it: a block quote on my dashboard, posted by my then-boyfriend, a series of posts on Low’s own Tumblr, and then the essay itself: about the fraught racial politics of the avant-garde.
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When you think of Tumblr, it’s not just, like, your Tumblr dashboard, but it’s like a memory of a screenshot of your Tumblr dashboard that’s on your Tumblr dashboard. — Trisha Low, “Hunting Season”
Photo of Nick Twemlow (left) by Michael Marcinkowski.
The poems in Nick Twemlow’s second collection, Attributed to the Harrow Painter, address art as they do adolescence, family, trauma, and addiction: as strokes of what make both the artist and the now-father. The speaker of these poems is in his midlife and the father of a young son, whom he cannot parent without being informed by the forces and relationships that have defined him. The “I” of this collection may ironize or chide the self, but it does not deny that the “self” informs the work in spite of life’s free radicals.
