Stay: threads, conversations, collaborations (ZE Series #002)

“If Nick Flynn’s Stay is a self-portrait, it is a self-portrait of our planet, of our contemporary consciousness in an undeniably wounded era. I think of it as an artist’s notebook, a prayer book, a monumental compendium of what it means to stay alive.” —Mary Ruefle

A mixed-media self-portrait from Nick Flynn — poet, bestselling memoirist of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and “field poet” on the Oscar-nominated Darwin’s Nightmare — assembled out of forty years of collaborations with the artists, photographers, filmmakers and writers who made him, from John Baldessari and Marilyn Minter to Catherine Opie, Amy Arbus and Robert De Niro.

With Stay, acclaimed poet, artist, and bestselling memoirist Nick Flynn presents a self-portrait via a constellation of topics that have circled his work. Ranging from the impact of suicide and homelessness to addiction, political engagement, and the vital power of artistic friendships, Stay is a mixed-media retrospective that shows nothing is created in isolation.

Mirroring Flynn’s life, this work of visual and literary memoir is populated by examples of his collaborations since the 1980s with such luminaries as the photographers Amy Arbus and Catherine Opie, composer Guy Barash, actor Robert De Niro, cartoonist Josh Neufeld, author Sarah Sentilles, filmmaker Paul Weitz, and artists John Baldessari, Marilyn Minter, and Bill Shuck. In Flynn’s refusal to conform to narrative or the safety of his own perspective, Stay grasps for an essential truth, an answer to what art, in the end, can and cannot reflect.