This Caravaggio

This Caravaggio is best described by one of its early readers, Eleanor Wilner, author of Tourist in “Here everything is lit with the sensual.” As in Caravaggio’s paintings, the light in these poems burns with a cold blue intensity, catching—in nuanced language that invites us into his mind and world—this strange amalgam of sexuality and remove, violence and delicacy, ugliness and beauty. With an incandescent clarity and a compassionate composure, Boutelle’s historical imagination—sophisticated, informed, free of judgment—opens us to possession by this seductive art and its defiant maker. Born and raised in Scotland, Annie Boutelle graduated from the university of St. Andrews (MA), and New York University (PhD). She has taught at Purnell School, Suffolk University, Mount Holyoke College, and (for the last 28 years) at Smith College,where she currently holds the position of Poet in Residence. She has authored Becoming Poems on the life of Celia Thaxter (University of Arkansas Press), and Nest of Thistles (University Press of New England, Morse Poetry Prize). Writing This Caravaggio has been for her an exhilarating adventure.