What Love Is: Book One

Description

Poet David Daniel and artist George Cochrane’s genre-bending collaboration asks and answers these most fundamental questions in their tour de force project, WHAT LOVE IS—a kaleidoscopic experience of over-lapping poems, images, and co-authored commentary that tell a dazzling, true story about the ordinary, heartbreaking, surprising, and sometimes miraculous manifestations of love that are all around us.

Daniel, an award-winning poet, and Cochrane, a widely exhibited and published artist, engaged in daily conversations over the course of a year, covering every detail of WHAT LOVE IS. The resulting volume’s marriage of text and image explodes traditional notions of poetic form and offers a stunning example of poetry integrated into a larger, ever-evolving visual experience. Cochrane’s artwork is not simply paired with Daniel’s words—instead, it transforms them, initiating a dialogue that activates new circuits of meaning and opens new avenues for interpretations.

Drawing on illuminated manuscripts, the work of William Blake, and comic books, Cochrane reimagines some poems as graphic novels, ranging from nine to twenty pages, expanding them into another language entirely—one that includes panels, sound effects, additional text, musical notation, and speech balloons. Daniel’s elegant, yet emotionally raw poetry meets Cochrane’s singular artistic vision—one founded in making his own autobiographical graphic novel and creating a new illuminated manuscript of another poet’s work, Dante’s Divine Comedy. The goal, according to Daniel, was to create a single vision that includes various points of view “that show the contrary states of the human experience, specifically the experience of love.” The result provides a unique portal into the world of poetry and art.