The poems and stories in our summer issue can be read as a travel log that starts in Shanxi, China with Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers’ poem “The Pool at Prosperous Hotel,” and ends in California with Mary Angelino’s poem “The Last Beach Ball in Palm Springs.” The issue is filled with global travel that often takes the reader to places lost in time. We go to ancient Iraq in Ashley Anna McHugh’s poem “Shanidar Cave (11,000-9,300 BC),” and to abandoned lots in Joseph Mulholland’s poem “Elegy For Drive-in Movie Theaters.” The issue also explores places that have suffered great loss, such as Louisiana in Rebecca Dunham’s “Elegy Written in Oil,” and places that remind of us of personal loss, as in Paulette Perhach’s essay “Baby Gate.”
What is lost in these places is rediscovered through the literature and art that reimagines them. Mid-journey we arrive at the work of illustrator Gabriella Barouch, which reimagines place by blending dreamlike lines and images with the artist’s close observations of reality. The Postcards is a curated series of illustrations inspired by Barouch’s travels and beloved places, especially her home city of Jerusalem. In three of the illustrations (Postcards I-III) Barouch visually interprets written messages on the back of old postcards purchased from a thift store. The rest of the series includes illustrations from a visual travel diary that Barouch kept while wandering the streets of Jerusalem for several months.
“The works were collected into a travel diary as an homage to the age-old tradition of travel chronicling from Jerusalem…parts of the diary will be posted on billboards and bus stops across Jerusalem, and thus the diary will be ‘given back’ to residents and come full circle,” says Barouch.
Barouch has illustrated for magazines, book publishers, newspapers, record labels, theaters, corporations, and civic events. She was recently the selected artist for the Jerusalem Season of Culture 2012. Barouch has exhibited her artwork and illustrations in France, Italy, Japan, the UK, Ukraine, and her home country of Israel. She is currently teaching illustration for a semester abroad at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.
