DAVID GIBSON WRITING

  There are a few subjects that rarely rise to the surface for discussion. One of these is the condition of extreme age. Writers who reach their older years evade the subject, preferring to deal with it through metaphor, or by use of a story that takes place in the distant past. Few allow that the here and now can contain such difficulty. Tsaurah Litzksy is not one of these. Her new collection of poems, Jerry in the Bardo , deals specifically with the ailing years of her father, Jerry Litzky, who suffered from various ailments that lessened his ability to function as an independent human being, and eventually, to be accepted around others as sane and normal. Her book is suffused with an undying empathy for his struggles as an elderly person. Starting when her father turned eighty, he began to exhibit behavioral changes that set him apart from what she knew of him at an earlier age. The challenge of infirmity for the elderly is only part physical, it is also primarily emotional, as thes

Elsie Kagan's painting is a form of revelation. It commingles a search for beauty with a sustained effort to manifest how reason, reality, and temperament can aid us in the creation of something new. Mining the history of artistic expression, searching for touchstones and wellsprings of inspiration, and being able to turn that research into a living and breathing new expression that can aptly invigorate the contemporary perception of beauty, is what Kagan does in her work. Kagan's is not only a technical virtuosity but an educated way of painting that refuses to lean on ability alone. It desires a greater statement, one that is filled with the promise of creation and the threat of destruction. There is a primal element in abundance that builds and drives her interest in genres and art movements: a systematic use of energy that creates a dynamic force within each work and throughout her entire oeuvre. Kagan's system is her combined use of historical styles co