Radio Free Nebraska: a Jam Session with Brent Terry and Lorette C. Luzajic

Brent Terry and Lorette C. Luzajic are thrilled to announce our collaboration, Radio Free Nebraska.

This collection features poetry by Brent Terry and visual art by Lorette C. Luzajic. 

​Click on image above to view on Amazon.

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Brent Terry and I met through a poetry anthology project with my artwork on its cover. He became addicted to my trademark square mixed media paintings and started collecting them. I became addicted to his poems, which were veritable feasts of the imagination. His poetry revealed that he understood the delight my art took in unexpected juxtapositions and the way that a mere morsel or tidbit of colour or texture could trigger a memory, or the meaning of life. We were on different sides of several borders, but it was clear we were long lost kin in some universe. When Brent confessed he had written a number of ekphrastic poems inspired by my work, I knew something epic was hatching. He suggested we collaborate on a collection of ekphrases and reverse ekphrases together.
Perhaps Brent and I had always been looking for an arts partner who shared our sensibility- a heady cocktail of irreverent fatalism mixed with incurable optimism. We let the project evolve naturally over a couple of years busy with the pandemic’s last legs, work, and incurable diseases, savouring the chance to dish over art and poetry on Zoom about the delicious and perplexing incongruities of existence. The “fine fine music” was the underlying rhythm in our electric, eclectic curiosities, and the fusion of nostalgia and anxiety was its backbone. 
Hi, Brent Here! Ditto to everything Lorette says above. As the subtitle to the collection says, this is a jam session. Lorette and I settled into a three-year groove of call and response, sometimes with me responding to a square in poetry, sometimes with Lorette responding to my poems with squares, but whichever came first, it was clear we had tuned-in to the same frequency. What resulted was a trip up and down the dial, a sort of four-dimensional, total-immersion radio experience. Our goal is for the readers to immerse themselves right along with us, come away changed. A full-body art baptism!
We present to you Radio Free Nebraska, a collection of poems after art by Lorette and art after poems by Brent. All of the mixed media collage paintings are album-cover-sized in their originals, known to Lorette’s collectors as “the Squares.” 
We have shown pieces of our collaboration at Gallery on the Green in Hartford, Connecticut, at several art exhibitions!