Martha Ronk’s essay on Bar­bara Guest’s “Wild Gar­dens Over­looked by Night Lights,” first pub­lished in Chicago Review’s Bar­bara Guest spe­cial issue, is up for the read­ing at Poetry Daily. Here’s Ronk on Guest’s ekphrasis:

As Guest’s ekphra­sis enables a move­ment beyond what she calls “the locked king­dom of linearity,” it also sug­gests the ways in which ekphras­tic fail­ure, a fail­ure built into the very project itself, pro­duces var­i­ous sig­nif­i­cant effects. No matter the effort, a poet can never bring the visual fully into lan­guage. Yet it is ekphrasis’s very apophatic nature that has the poten­tial to unleash the unseen, the mys­te­ri­ous, the hal­lu­ci­na­tory. Ekphra­sis per­forms both impos­si­bil­ity and its over­com­ing in alter­nat­ing fashion.