This series of fifty-four photographs follows Route 36 across the Kansas prairie, capturing the region's strong light and registering detailed textures within its vast spaces. Cottonwood trees, twisted by wind, break up the expanses, conveying a sense of scale and vertical life. The images move between the dry, rolling landscape and stark, vertical structures. Buildings often present blank faces, abandoned without names or signage, former uses unspecified. They sometimes appear as depthless surfaces against the deep expanse of prairie. Moving through the collection, we come to recognize this tension―between obsolescence and natural beauty―as characteristic of the region and its moment in history. In his foreword to the book, Merrill Gilfillan comments, "It seems continually necessary to reassert that landscape study and its reflective arts are anything but passive disciplines, that civilization in a sustaining, daily sense emerges most surely from good relations with one's surroundings...Bill Wylie's recent 36 crossings-with-camera remint all of this: the region's great capacity for inflection, double take, and surprise. The humble aplomb of things-in-waiting: a preposterous barn, crooked old trees half crazy with neglect. And the benignity of a deftly cast eye." This series of fifty-four photographs follows Route 36 across the Kansas prairie, capturing the region's strong light and registering detailed textures within its vast spaces. Cottonwood trees, twisted by wind, break up the expanses, conveying a sense of scale and vertical life. The images move between the dry, rolling landscape and stark, vertical structures. Buildings often present blank faces, abandoned without names or signage, former uses unspecified. They sometimes appear as depthless surfaces against the deep expanse of prairie. Moving through the collection, we come to recognize this tension--between obsolescence and natural beauty--as characteristic of the region and its moment in history. In his foreword to the book, Merrill Gilfillan comments, "It seems continually necessary to reassert that landscape study and its reflective arts are anything but passive disciplines, that civilization in a sustaining, daily sense emerges most surely from good relations with one's surroundings...Bill Wylie's recent 36 crossings-with-camera remint all of this: the region's great capacity for inflection, double take, and surprise. The humble aplomb of things-in-waiting: a preposterous barn, crooked old trees half crazy with neglect. And the benignity of a deftly cast eye." The sequence allows poetry to think, refusing comfortable propositions--Elizabeth Arnold has perfected the form. What Effacement is thinking about is the body, and the materials Arnold is using to think with are many and mixed, from Philip Johnson's glass house to the translucent fish of the hadal depths, from the portraits of wounded soldiers Henry Tonks drew at Aldershot to case studies of reconstructive surgery. In a small way, Arnold's own history with cancer and mastectomy assumes its place among the images, history, and discourse that make up the book of the body. To be a soul is easy, she writes in one poem; the harder part is to burn back into the world.--Keith Tuma The sequence allows poetry to think, refusing comfortable propositions--Elizabeth Arnold has perfected the form. What Effacement is thinking about is the body, and the materials Arnold is using to think with are many and mixed, from Philip Johnson's glass house to the translucent fish of the hadal depths, from the portraits of wounded soldiers Henry Tonks drew at Aldershot to case studies of reconstructive surgery. In a small way, Arnold's own history with cancer and mastectomy assumes its place among the images, history, and discourse that make up the book of the body. To be a soul is easy, she writes in one poem; the harder part is to burn back into the world.--Keith Tuma For over thirty years, William Wylie's work has focused on the significance of landscape, exploring associations between particular places and their histories. He has published five previous books of photography: Riverwalk (2000), Stillwater (2002), Carrara (2009), Route 36 (2010), and Pompeii Archive (2018). His photographs and short films have been shown internationally and can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Yale University Art Museum. He lives in Charlottesville and is the Commonwealth Professor of Art at the University of Virginia.