New York Review Books

Dime—Store Alchemy…is the most sustained literary response this far to Cornell’s boxes, montages, and films…Incisive, freewheeling, dramatic? A mixture of evocation and observation, as lucid and shadowy as the imagination it celebrates…Dime—Store Alchemy is a meeting of kindred spirits that is itself a work of art.
— Edward Hirsch, The New Yorker

A beautiful book that evokes Cornell’s artistic spirit.
— Harper’s Bazaar

Appropriately, this study is neither a straightforward critical account of Cornell’s art nor a merely literary embellishment of it, but rather a parallel text: written by Simic (Hotel Insomnia), one of our best poets, it includes his own poems and reminiscences, as well as quotations from a variety of other writers. Simic mingles biography and critical discussion with selections of writings from the artist’s notebooks. The book emerges as a piece of writing constructed along the enigmatic lines of Cornell’s art. And that art, as Simic sees it, gathers from the scattered pieces of the American past a new, redeeming reality; at heart, this art is a religious practice. Only seemingly random, Simic’s approach develops both the plain detail of Cornell’s life and illuminates the nature of his work.
— Publisher’s Weekly