Frank's Wing

' my relationship with most art living or lost / is the same as yours: we will pass it by bemoans the last poem in Jacob McArthur Mooney s latest collection. Written as a sequence of ghost ekphrastics (poems inspired by works of art that neither the poet nor most living people have ever seen), Frank s Wing constructs a whole world of lost or destroyed artifacts that have been rearticulated and resurrected, brought back to life by a fictional property baron as a dying gift to Toronto s Art Gallery of Ontario. From decadent modern paintings torched by Nazis, to lost films, to never-performed performance art, the abiding premise of the book is that art invites mourning: not because it is mournful, but because it is vast. It taunts the plans of mortals while a week / of kids videos and lip syncs / siphon through the internet each second. Bordering ideas about FOMO and mortality are considerations of destruction itself, as the book recalls loss events predicted