Painted Daydreams

B. Elizabeth Beck

After years of researching art and writing ekphrastic poetry, B. Elizabeth Beck gifts us with her own work of art. Painted Daydreams is a book about the kinship between artists and a true celebration of the creative spirit. This poetry collection is not only inspired, but it also creates inspiration, as well!

What Others Say About Painted Daydreams

B. Elizabeth Beck's Painted Daydreams is a multi-media experience: While evoking canonic images from artistic icons and iconoclasts alike, from Rothko to O'Keeffe to Basquiat, these ekphrastic poems also allow a reader to eavesdrop on intimate conversations between Beck and these artists who inspire her—the whispers in Van Gogh's one good, remaining ear backed by psychedelic riffs from Phish and the Grateful Dead. All the while, Beck's life in Kentucky—the collection's vivid underpainting—peers through, ensuring that though these poems may well have sprung from the staid environs of art museums, they breathe and sweat in the vivid, living world.

—Jessica Jacobs

Taken together, the formally diverse and kaleidoscopically (allusionistically!) rich Ekphrastic poems in B. Elizabeth Beck's collection Painted Daydreams are a lot more than responses to (or even meditations on) works of visual art. They are a reminder that to live an artful life is to see the art in everything one does, and to feel it in everything one experiences, whether that's out on a run listening to Phish, walking barefoot in a river, or staring searchingly into a Rosa Bonheur painting and finding there one's own complicated relationship to the world. Painted Daydreams is itself a vivid portrait of the mind in motion over a lifetime, looking at and being with/in art. As such, it electrifies not only art, but the desire to be alive.

—Matt Hart

Pyramids of Giza

Even though the hook they used
to remove the brains through
the nose freaks me out, I do
love my grandmother's scarab
bracelet we did not bury with her.

Instead, I lost it. The stone
sarcophagus isolates masked
mummies with gleaming gems
teetering in eye sockets.
Five-toed naked cats spool
figure eights around crumbling
granite intended to withstand heartbreaks
ingrained in hieroglyphics
inventorying life in minute detail

does not stave off the inevitability
of mortality. As the Great
Sphinx roars Nefertiti's brilliance
and Cleopatra's beautiful kohllined
violet eyes lead by Isis before
meeting Osiris disguised as ancient
animal spirits, the Kush empire
blazes golden after Alexander
the Great lead Egypt as pied piper
into the Hellenistic world.

Details and Ordering

Publication Date: June 1, 2019
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-936628-50-6
Price: $16.00

About the Author

Elizabeth Beck is a writer, artist and teacher who lives with her family on a pond in Lexington, Kentucky. Painted Daydreams: Collection of Ekphrastic Poems is her third book. Elizabeth achieved her B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Fine Arts from the University of Cincinnati and her M.Ed. from Xavier University. She is an award-winning English and Art History teacher. During her time at Withrow High School, she founded The Tracks literary magazine. She is the proud recipient of an Artist Enrichment grant through the Kentucky Foundation for Women. November 2011, Elizabeth founded The Teen Howl Poetry Series that serves the youth of Central Kentucky. In 2015, she founded Leestown OUT LOUD spoken word group in her capacity as Drama teacher at Leestown Middle School.