By Lynne Avadenka
Huntington Woods, Michigan: Land Marks Press, 2010.
Edition of 25.

12 x 6";28 pages. Simple accordion flag structure with double flag pages interspersed. Letterpress printed on Shin Torinoko Cream paper from photopolymer plates. Printed with Silentium Pro and David types and Hebrew wood type. Illustrations of color lithography created from brush drawings. Housed in a wrapper of Kyosei-shi paper over boards with a laced vellum closure. Text printed in Hebrew and English.

Land Marks Press: "Of the hundreds of Hebrew poems written in medieval Jewish Spain, one is attributed to a woman. Will Her Love Remember, by The Wife of Dunash ben Labrat, is the starting point for Lynne Avadenka’s new artist’s book, Plum Colored Regret. The original poem drives the movement of the book and Avadenka’s powerful prose amplifies the voice of the poet.

"Plum Colored Regret, like other editions created by Avadenka, combines a skillful integration of text and image, an original, innovative binding and multiple printmaking techniques. The tiles and calligraphic art of medieval Spain inspire the format of the book and the imagery contained within."

The innovative structure of overlapping pages gracefully and delicately allows the book to present an 8-line poem from 10th-century Spain, Peter Cole's contemporary English translation of the poem, and Avadenka's own words, her response to that poem, "opening it up to fill its elegant blanks." Part visual music that echoes and expands the original poem and part a physical demonstration of the unstated poem's depth, Plum Colored Regret continues the long line of impressive works by Land Marks Press. And to think this one began with a woman known only as "The Wife of Dunash ben Labrat."