Randall R. Freisinger

Accessible and engaging, the poems in Randall R. Freisinger's Nostalgia's Thread are provocative reconsiderations of the American experience as depicted in ten of Norman Rockwell's best known paintings. These poems remind us that visual art is never static, the beholder's eye never innocent. They bear witness to the fact that each cultural era must inevitably reinterpret its rich artistic inheritance within the context of its current collective experience. With unflinching honesty and deep compassion, these poems present a personal and collective past which is both comforting and disturbing, both "nostalgia's thread" and "the barbed wire / of memory."