Gallery Of Clouds, Eisendrath, Rachel

Gallery of Clouds opens in New York City with a dream, or a vision, of meeting Virginia Woolf in the afterlife. She holds out her manuscript to her--an infinite moment passes--and Woolf takes it and begins to read. From here, in this act of magical reading, the book scrolls out in a series of reflective pieces connected through an association of metaphors and ideas. Golden threadlines tie each part to the next: a rupture of time in a Pisanello painting; Montaignes practice of revision in his essays; a segue through Vivian Gordon Harsh, the first African-American librarian in the Chicago public library system; a fragment of Spenser; a brief history of prose style; a meditation on the active versus the contemplative life; the story of Sarapion, a fifth-century monk; the persistence of the pastoral; image-making and thought; reading Willa Cather to her grandmother in her Chicago apartment; the deviations of Benjamins scholarly romance The Arcades. Eisendraths wondrously woven hybrid work extols the materiality of reading, its pleasures and delights, with wild leaps and bounding grace.