Pairing poems with paintings is an intriguing (if imperfect) science that can involve unlikely collaborations, which hopefully produce transcendent art. Thankfully, such is the case with Hell, Probably, the new joint effort by poet Ronna Lebo and painter Philippe Avignant — brought together by the curation of their publisher, Dallas Athent. The result is a bracing poetic collection of Lebo’s vividly rendered recollections and surreal warnings for an era of feminine resistance and political awareness, which flow past Avignant’s wide-eyed caricatured denizens of a whirling dimension of necessary madness.
At his reading people were dead, a course so unlikely — forever when you think about it, nothing complete actually — the rest of the past already gone with those few lines, for obvious reasons, like we guessed it, kind of, but not because it works.
Lebo’s voice for Avignant’s faces erupts with the poetic urgency of that unnatural second mouth in the book’s opening painting, and is well worth focusing both of your eyes on.