Author Description

Between 1971 and 1985, Andrew Wyeth, then America's most famous and beloved artist who was best known for his iconic painting Christina's World, secretly sketched and painted nearly 250 portraits of his neighbor, Helga Testorf. Wyeth had promised Helga that the paintings would never be revealed to the public until after his death. No one, not even Wyeth's wife nor Helga's husband, knew that the paintings even existed until 1985 when the secret somehow got out. Up until his death in 2009, Wyeth insisted that he and Helga did not have a sexual affair. As Helga herself put it in a 2013 interview, "They didn't know any better. They didn't know our language. We were not talking that way. We had better things to think about." Eleven of the twelve poems in this book are based on Wyeth's portraits of Helga, with the title of each painting serving as the title for each poem. These eleven poems are written from the artist's point of view. The final poem in the book, "Helga's Words," however, is a found poem comprised solely of direct quotes from Helga herself, quotes that give her the final word about the paintings and her relationship with Wyeth.