July 13, 2015
“The stories and photographs in Quintan Ana Wikswo’s The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us this Far strike a balance of power that is exceedingly rare in books that combine fiction with photography…Wikswo is equally deft with words and photographs.
“The densely-layered, impressionistic, and yet coherent images in her book seem to have been created with specific stories in mind and yet they can all stand on their own as complex, intriguing images. Going back and forth between the photographs and the text, one sees that the two are complementary in their moody colors, refracted light, ghostly images, disjointed layers, and tangled meanings. The photographs don’t illustrate the text, they serve as the visual equivalent of the text.”
“At the core of every story is nature, not the pristine landscapes of an Ansel Adams but a nature that is murky, gooey, slippery, stormy, malign, and, above all else, erotic. .. what wins out in the end is Wikswo’s desire to reintroduce the reader to an intense level of natural vitality that can feel lacking in modern life. It’s not so much an attempt to erase the modern but to restore something ancient and eternal to its rightful place.“