These poems are written in response to photographs in Gregory Crewdson's exhibit 'An Eclipse of Moths.' Ekphrasis, persona, homage, interrogation, and response became ways to find inspiration when our normal lives were interrupted. They were my best effort to write anything other than a pandemic poem. I would sometimes return to the same photograph and find a new way to write to or from it.
Winner of the 2021 Moonstone Chapbook Contest
“With unerring pitch, Charles Malone offers a series of miniature meditations in After an Eclipse of Moths: The Crewdson Poems. Written in correspondence with Gregory Crewdson’s photographic sequence, the poems enlarge ekphrasis with questions, arguments, fictionalizations and digressions that unearth the alienation and inarticulate longing of small town, post-industrial America. His cool distance and tonal control put a brake on the passage of time, slowing it so that motion and emotion can be observed, absorbed, and reconstituted as an interzone between the ordinary and the uncanny, the broken and the transcendent.”
—J.C. Todd
View Original Photography by Crewdson