“When the Bow Breaks,” oil on canvas, 6 x 8.2′, from the Player series by Peregrine Honig
The magazine’s winter issue features an artist and poet collaboration by Peregrine Honig and Hadara Bar-Nadav
All eyes are upon you, and a silence descends in rapt anticipation of an ennobled utterance. Perhaps a curse, or an apology, an accolade, or even a warning. That pregnant pause which precedes the consummation of pigment and prose is hauntingly memorialized in a collaboration between internationally exhibited Kansas City artist Peregrine Honig and Hadara Bar-Nadav, National Endowment of the Arts Fellow and Lucille Medwick Award winner.
The current iteration of the project, a collection of seven poems by Bar-Nadav scheduled to appear in the 2026 winter issue of Pleiades literary magazine, had its genesis at an event Dec. 16, 2023, at Studios, Inc. in Kansas City that featured Honig’s “Player” series of paintings.
During what was described as an evening of “poetry and percussion in response to seven paintings,” Mike Dillon on marimbas and tabla responded to poets José Faus and Hadara Bar-Nadav. The opportunity to merge visual art, spoken word poetry and music began when Honig was awarded a Studios, Inc residency in 2021. With nearly 2,000 square feet available to her for three years, the artist recalls, “I felt like a small dog in a big kennel. Having this time-sensitive, open space allowed me to collaborate on a larger scale and hire a group of people I admire — hear how they would respond to my work in a scheduled public setting. I brought in sound engineer Chad Meise to honor the artists’ medium. The room was full.”
Each of the 6-by-8-foot oil on canvas paintings in “Player” hearkens to a fairy tale or nursery rhyme, with the featured character front and center, awaiting the curtain call for their audition “for a play that never got produced.” It is Bar-Nadav’s lyrical prose that provides these fabled, wayward creatures a solution to their dramatic purgatory, with her words filling the silence left in the wake of each lost soul whom Honig has immortalized on her canvas stages.
An NEA fellow, professor of English at University of Missouri Kansas City, and author of several poetry collections, Bar-Nadav infuses Honig’s work with internal dialogue and vivid metaphor while still respecting the autonomy and mystery of her subjects. “José Faus and Hadara’s poetry is just another layer on the surface of the work,” notes Honig.
For example, the painting “When the Bow Breaks” features an inquisitive-looking woman disguised as a satyr sitting atop a tree branch. She holds an ornate bow and has pressed an arrow into her abdomen. With great deftness, Bar-Nadav offers a rhetorical mirror to reveal society’s assessment of the protagonist’s predicament. “Beast of a girl, horned as all girls are. Demon-headed, begging for more.”
In addition to Bar-Nadav’s poetry, the new issue of Pleiades includes images of each entry in the “Player” series, documented by longtime Kansas City fine arts photographer E.G. Schempf.
Pleiades, one of Missouri’s foremost literary periodicals, is supported by the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Missouri and the Missouri Arts Council.
Other Missouri writers featured in this issue include Dana Levin, the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis; Melissa Ferrer Civil, the first Poet Laureate of Kansas City; Glenn North, a Poet-in-Residence at the Museum of Kansas City and the current Poet Laureate of the 18th & Vine Historic Jazz District; and Steve Paul, a Kansas City journalist, poet and fine arts critic.
Peregrine Honig’s “Players” collection of paintings is currently housed at DPR Gallery in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
For more about Pleiades or to order a copy of the winter issue, contact pleiadesmag.com.
WHEN THE BOW BREAKS
Beast of a girl, horned as all girls are. Demon-headed, begging for more.
Sitting pretty in cream and grease. Girl draped in gold and military green.
My legs were once severed at the hip. I was whited out, contained my own violence.
Then out of my body, a body formed. My flesh painted in. Legs with which I can walk or kick.
Far-away eyes, moony, leak love. My arrow glistens at the tip, points to its star.
— Hadara Bar-Nadav
