Before the Borderless

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize Dean Rader reaches beyond artistic description to engage Twomblys work in conversation.In 2018, just a few weeks after his fathers death, Dean Rader made a pilgrimage to the Gagosian Gallery in New York to see a retrospective of Cy Twomblys work, In Beauty It is Finished: Drawings 1951-2008. The exhibit led to a poem that would become the genesis of this book from loss and fear to regret and beauty, Before the Borderless: The Cy Twombly Cycle reaches for the embodiment of emotion and the aesthetics of possibility.Through a range of experimental forms, including a series of octets, Rader writes to decode the gestures and energies in Twomblys drawings and paintings. He reaches past observation and admiration to create a game of echolocation, reflecting Twomblys infinite scrawls as saddle stitch, spaghetti curl, white whirl. Even as Rader searches for proximity, examining the gaps between symbols and what they signify, the collection remains unmistakably autobiographical. From the wheatfields of his Western Oklahoma upbringing to questions of lossfirst his father and then his mother, who passed only weeks after Rader finished the manuscript for this bookthe poems in Before the Borderless are both elegy and prayer, for Raders parents, for his children, for the world.Blurring the distinction between canvas and page, Twomblys work often includes lines of poetry from many of the authors who shaped Raders work John Keats, Sappho, Federico Garca Lorca, and Rainer Maria Rilke. As Raders poems are paired with 50 color images of Twomblys paintings and drawings, the line between looking and reading is blurred. Before the Borderless awakens in the space between language and silence to pose provocative questions about art and its power to heal.