Philip Guston always had eminent artist friends. Tireless in his quest for the unknown, the still undiscovered, Guston engaged poets and literati in intense dialogues that, starting in the sixties, led to fruitful collaborations - including the creation of numerous illustrations and cover images for works by poets such as William Corbett, Bill Berkson, and Clark Coolidge. In his "poempictures," Guston ultimately turned to producing interactions of text and drawings - as responses to poems by his writer friends or as independent works that incorporated selected lines of poetry.

Published to accompany the major retrospective exhibition on Hung Liu, "Summoning Ghosts" is a comprehensive look at the work of this extraordinary Chinese-American artist. A pioneer in Chinese contemporary art before the Chinese avant-garde came into being, Lui's life spanned two centuries and bridged two totally different economic situations. The wide-ranging essays in this book, which features 140 color illustrations, reflect on how Hung Liu's evocative art is inextricably bound to her equally rich and complex life. While considering the artist's primary work as a painter, the contributors also celebrate her murals, permanent and temporary installations, photography, and video.

This collection of rare, abstract Tantra drawings was conceived when the French poet Franck Andre Jamme stumbled on a small catalogue of Tantric art at a Paris bookseller's stall. The volume included writings by Octavio Paz and Henri Michaux, and Jamme became fascinated by the images' affinity with modern art and poetry. He read voraciously and even journeyed to India, searching in vain for Tantric practitioners, until a bus accident on the road to Jaipur sent him home to France with serious injuries. When he returned a few years later, he met a soothsayer who proclaimed that Jamme had now paid sufficient tribute to the goddess Shakti and required him to take a vow: he must visit the "tantrikas" alone or only in the company of a loved one. Since then, Jamme has gained extraordinary access to very private communities of adepts and their intensely beautiful works. These contemporary, anonymous drawings from Rajasthan are unlike the more familiar strands of Tantric art--the geometric yantras, or erotic illustrations of the "Kama Sutra." The progeny of seventeenth-century illustrated religious treatises, these drawings have evolved into a distinct visual lexicon designed to awaken heightened states of consciousness and are imbued with specific spiritual meanings (e.g. spirals and arrows for energy, an inverted triangle for Shakti). A revelatory volume on this occluded genre of Indian art, "Tantra Song" is a convergence of east and west, the spiritual and the aesthetic, the ancient and the modern.
Franck Andre Jamme is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry. His translated workds (by John Ashbery, Charles Borkuis, David Kelley and others) include "New Exercises," "Another Silent Attack," "The Recitation of Forgetting" and "Extracts of the Life of a Beetle." He has collaborated on books with a number of artists including Philippe Favier, Suzan Frecon, Acharya Vyakul and Hanns Schimansk. A specialist in Art Brut, Tantric and tribal art of India, he has participated in exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Beaux-Art de Paris and The Drawing Center, among others.

Allen Ruppersberg (born 1944) is among the first generation of American conceptual artists. "Allen Ruppersberg: and Writing" presents a wide array of the artist's text-based works from the late 1960s through to his most recent projects. A companion volume to "Allen Ruppersberg Drawing," it gathers writings (and visual works containing writing) from series and projects such as "Al's Cafe," "From the South Forty to the Bunkhouse," "Great Acts of the Imagination," "Le Mot Juste," "Free Poetry," "Obits" and "Studies," and excerpts from "The Novel that Writes Itself" and "Great Speckled Bird." In his introduction to the book, poet Bill Berkson writes: "Ruppersberg's co-exemplars are John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha Because they are visual artists first, they present language foremost as image--color, shape, light and scale being conditioned often enough by lettering, the quality of handwriting or font, or the format of a book. The upshot is a blithe alchemical switch of sign into symbol."