Home in Three Days, Don't Wash

There's a photograph in here that's hard to read at first. Then suddenly you see it's two, imposed on one another: portraits of Linda Smukler and Gertrude Stein. Stein hovers behind, above, beneath these brazen texts. Like her modernist forbearer, Smukler uses the most direct and plain American idiom to render the complexity, anguish, and the humor of desire. Rebecca Brown