Analyst

When a psychoanalyst became a painter after surviving a stroke, her longtime patient, distinguished and beloved poet Molly Peacock, took up a unique task. The Analyst is a new, visceral, twenty-first century “in memoriam” of ambiguous loss in which Peacock brilliantly tells the story of a decades-long patient-therapist relationship that now reverses and continues to evolve. Peacock invigorates the notion of poetry as word-painting: A tapestry of images, from a red enameled steamer on a black stove to Tibetan monks funneling glowing sand into a painting, create the backdrop for her quest to define identity.From “In Our Unexpected Future”:…for frocks outlast pillars. But feelingsoutlive frocks. The immaterial storms through,a force beyond years (a mere four since youwere nearly felled). It isn’t what happened that lasts.Not art, either, but the savory core. What’s felt.