Rigor & Sky / A Communion
Coming soon!
2025, Singing Swallow Productions
ISBN: 979-8-218-65615-7 / Pages: 70 / Hardcover
Will be available for purchase at selected bookstores.
Rigor & Sky / A Communion is a limited edition, hand bound, letter-pressed anthology. This book is an ekphrastic collaboration by six unique poets who responded brilliantly to a series of twenty-five paintings by Linda Saccoccio. The series of paintings originated in a small book handmade in Nepal. They represent a turning point in Linda’s work.
Poems by: Carolyn Guinzio, Robert Krut, Heller Levinson, Elizabeth Robinson, Maw Shein Win, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Linda Saccoccio.
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Wouldn’t you love to have a little cathedral of your own right now—a place to turn to for release and restoration? Rigor & Sky is just such an oratory: Linda Saccoccio’s paintings are like stained-glass windows (light pours through these images as if the page were transparent!) and the poems are indeed a “communion” and choir—a gorgeous ensemble of perfectly pitched voices. What a joy, what a deep delight to dwell in the saturated and uncommon colors and lively, always graceful, gestures of this wonderful painter, and to be invited to explore and enjoy the varieties of ekphrastic response written by a perfectly curated group of gifted writers. “Peaceful and exciting, “as Gertrude Stein liked to say, marvelously inspiring, these pairings can be—depending on your mood—places to rest and revive, or prompts to further creativity: this book is both church and community.
-- Laura Mullen, author of, ETC
In the centuries-long tradition of ekphrasis comes an anthology that compounds the collaborative threads, weaving six poets and a painter for Rigor & Sky. I would love to fill a wall with each voice of ink and paint, stand back, and take the magic in like a sunrise, singing over rays of color.
-- CA Conrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
I’m not sure whether I’m more taken with Linda Saccoccio’s paintings—brilliant whirls and detonations of pure color—or the poems that accompany them, which transform abstraction into the real and delightful things of this world. Fortunately, readers of Rigor & Sky don’t have to choose: both paintings and poems are here in abundance, enacting, as the book’s subtitle suggests, a true communion between these two art forms.
-- David Starkey, author of You, Caravaggio
By turns meditative, spare, and utterly gorgeous, Rigor & Sky probes the nature of ekphrasis: of not merely engaging an artwork through the medium of writing, but of inhabiting and, as the term’s Greek origins suggest, of speaking from it. The poems, like the paintings, are often erotic, in two senses of that word: some provoke desire, while others index lack. The volume thus alternates between Saccoccio’s sensory abundance and a cultivated absence, prominent in certain poems, which speak through their silences and vacuities. In doing so, the book models a mutual creativity, where poem and painting genuinely make one another, both in the minds and sensoria of its readers. The result is a sensory feast, yes, but a delicate one, which feeds the intellect as it satisfies our ongoing desire for beauty.
— John James, author of Extinction Song, 2026
