Unsolicited Press is thrilled to announce the release of Drowning Girl, a boundary-pushing poetry collection by acclaimed writer Kurt Cole Eidsvig, available starting today, September 24, 2024. Inspired by Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic painting, Drowning Girl, this book takes readers on an unforgettable journey through the vibrant intersection of art, poetry, and personal discovery.

With his signature creativity, Eidsvig blends a variety of mediums—including text messages, footnotes, and song lyrics—into this genre-defying work. Set against the tumultuous backdrop of an approaching hurricane along the East Coast, Drowning Girl isn’t just a book; it’s an experience. Each page offers something fresh and exciting, as Eidsvig explores the history of every dot in Lichtenstein’s painting while weaving together a captivating narrative of art and connection.

Eidsvig's background as an arts writer and poet shines as he pushes the boundaries of traditional poetry to create a novel-in-verse that will intrigue fans of both art and literature. Whether you're a lover of experimental writing or fascinated by how personal experiences shape our interpretation of art, Drowning Girl is a must-read that will keep you turning the pages.

About the Author
Kurt Cole Eidsvig is a poet, arts writer, and fiction author whose work has appeared in numerous publications. Known for his innovative style and passion for exploring the intersection between visual art and narrative, Eidsvig continues to captivate audiences with his thought-provoking works. Drowning Girl is the latest in a line of his genre-defying projects.

Praise for Drowning Girl:
​Kurt Cole Eidsvig’s writing is noteworthy in how it synthesizes the aesthetics of pop art with street-level romantic minimalism, bound together in a worldview apprenticed at once to visual arts, poetry, fiction, and screenwriting.  In Drowning Girl, Eidsvig dances through interconnected worlds—inner, outer, emotional, harsh at times, and, one feels, even joyful—to tell a story at once visceral and liminal, personal and yet deeply informed by the cultural moment.  His prose-poem-novel seems to take “I don’t care!  I’d rather sink . . . ” from Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl as a starting point, an invitation, and a microcosm.  Eidsvig’s work, centered at the intersection of art and life, is irrepressible, unique, entertaining, clever, and perhaps because of this, essential.--Michael Davis, author of Gravity
 
Drowning Girl is a euphoric and melancholic meditation on existing between landscapes. How do you establish a YOU ARE HERE, when you are also there and there and there? This is the mind’s travel itinerary, dizzying as Lichtenstein’s canvas of Ben Day dots: Key West, the Berkshires, Boston, New York, Montana. How do you travel when the map is coming apart at its folds? When no landscape is drawn to scale? You orient yourself by building your own cathedrals: art, old neighborhoods, the memories of lovers, mothers, fathers, and friends. This is where you came from. This was the winding path you took. You can look back, even savor the footnotes, but you can’t stay long. A seasoned traveler knows the arrows of time are pointed, annoyingly, forward. Eidsvig welcomes us to hitch a ride in order to find out how to curate a life when your museum is ever moving. This is a painstaking cataloging of the bitter and the beautiful moments in life. The reader is invited to be, like the narrator, a “painter in a hurricane”—storm chaser, survivor, then excavator, unearthing the artful from the numbing disaster of technology and pop culture.—Wendy Erman Harvey, author of Vicinity

Drowning Girl is a tour de force of poetry that alludes, scampers, plays and generously appropriates from a wide variety of sources, using the Roy Lichtenstein painting as ekphrasic inspiration, unmasking the “Brad” in the painting as bard, lover and playmaker. Replete with art and literature references, this Ben-Day dotted work emits Morse codes filled with delight.—Michel Steven Krug, author of Jazz at the International Festival of Despair

Eidsvig’s Drowning Girl is an immersive and deeply evocative journey through art, addiction, obsession, and the enduring power of fleeting connection amidst the relentless tide of entropy. Cutting, profound, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, Drowning Girl is both a celebration of art and a testament to the unlikely convergence of grief and grace through which it is made manifest. It’s a wonderful book.—Aryn Kyle, author of Boys and Girls Like You and Me

For more information, to request review copies, or to schedule an interview with Kurt Cole Eidsvig, please contact: info@unsolicitedpress.com