As Ever, Miriam
Faythe Levine
OK Stamp Press, 2024, $25
In 1915, art professor Charlotte Partridge and English professor Miriam Frink crossed paths at Milwaukee Downer College, where Partridge was head of the Fine Arts Department. The two fell in love and went on to cofound the pioneering Layton School of Art just five years later and run it for 34 eventful years. Levine, archivist at Women’s Studio Workshop, spent hundreds of hours among correspondence and archived material to illuminate their lives, their award-winning careers, and a love story that was ahead of its time.
If Not in Heaven, Then in Saugerties:
A Town Portrait in Poems
Will Nixon
Bushwack Books, 2024, $20
Ulster County poet and photographer Will Nixon, stuck in the alternate reality that was the April 2020 Covid lockdown, found himself deeply touched by the experience of seeing his much-beloved community of Saugerties reduced to a shadow of its former self and was moved to capture the essence of his love in a series of poems about its characters and ambience. Besides the poems themselves, the book includes the stories that inspired them and portraits by fellow Saugertesian Joanne Pagano Weber.
Cold Spring, NY
Alissa and Will Malnati
Heimisdottir Publishing, 2024, $38
The Hudson Highlands have a powerful magic, and the tiny, vibrant village of Cold Spring concentrates that spirit into a classic, vital Main Street framed by enigmatic mountains and waters. The Malnatis have distilled the village’s soul into a coffee table book featuring 50 revealing, evocative black-and-white images of its downtown, where historic architecture meets 21st-century commerce and the surrounding farmlands and forests and the creatures that inhabit them, and its exquisite backdrop of water and stone.
I Tell Henrietta
Tina Barry
AIM Higher, 2024, $24
High Falls writer Barry’s collection of 40 hybrid poems and micro fictions wanders in the land where memoir and imagination merge, accompanied by eight interpretive images by Stone Ridge artist Kristin Flynn. The meticulously observed, lyrical work evokes the mysteries of the mid-20th-century adult world through a child’s eyes and those of the woman she becomes, rendering the resonant moments that stay with us as we grow older in a diary-like series of observations and adventures that the speaker shares with her closest confidante.
Town of Olive
Melissa McHugh
Arcadia Publishing, 2024, $24.99
Olive is quintessential Catskills—a place of fresh breezes and epic prettiness, a challenging place to settle, where indefatigable pioneers took on the challenge of extracting a living from the rocky soils, forest, and flowing waters and built a community that would draw many hundreds of urbanites in search of peace and fresh air and, later, a water source for their ever-thirsty millions. McHugh, an archivist and director of the Olive Free Library, tells the story of the town through images and a few well-chosen words.
This article appears in January 2025.
