The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield

I first clapped eyes on Charles Burchfield's paintings of slumped houses and ecstatic, vibrational landscapes at an exhibition in New York; though painted long ago, they felt uncannily close to me, and I was jolted to realize he was born in Ashtabula, Ohio, not far from my mother’s family, and grew up in Salem. Most people see Ohio as a nowhere land (it is a place that has been wholly denuded and reshaped by settlers, with old trees and untouched places rare and precious), but there is a beauty...