The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks - Agnieszka Taborska

The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks by Agnieszka Taborska, translated by Ursula Phillips / with collages by Selena Kimball / 124-page paperback published in 2024 by Twisted Spoon / ISBN 9788088628019

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Phoebe Hicks owes her unexpected career as a spiritualist to a photograph taken of her through her bedroom window after having eaten spoiled clams. What comes out of her mouth is taken to be ectoplasm, and word spreads that she is able to commune with the dead. As the prototype for the medium, she establishes the standard for how a séance should be conducted during the sessions held in her Providence, Rhode Island, home where a growing number of curious participants witness materializations of such figures as Ivan the Terrible, Harry Houdini, Catherine the Great, Hatshepsut, Elizabeth Báthory, and a host of others. Told as a compilation of episodes conjoined with Selena Kimball’s haunting collages, The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks is a feminist surrealist exploration of the rise of Spiritualism and the role of the medium in 19th-century America alongside the expectations, and constraints, imposed on women.

'Agnieszka Taborska, otherwise innocent, has, during her annual pilgrimage into “the murky back-streets of Providence,” shamelessly consorted with the spirits of such infamous locals as Poe, Lovecraft, and Hawkes, giving spiritual birth to the charmingly eerie nineteenth-century medium, Phoebe Hicks. Phoebe’s story, which, the author says, “seems to belong more to dream than reality,” is a delightful postmodernist mix of fiction and history, hovering delicately between parody and mystery. Taborska’s fictional character Leonora de la Cruz makes a guest appearance, Harry Houdini challenges Phoebe to a kind of duel, and Alain Resnais, we’re told, had intended to make Phoebe the heroine of his 20th-century film Providence, scared off perhaps by her “disturbing ambiguity.” Phoebe is by turns a genuine communicant with the spiritual world, a fraud, an artist, a feminist, a psychiatrist, a lunatic. She can also be, thanks to her ethereal deadpan humor, very funny.' – Robert Coover

Agnieszka Taborska is a writer and art historian specializing in French Surrealism. She divides her time between Warsaw, Poland, and Providence, USA, where she teaches art history and literature at the Rhode Island School of Design. Having published over twenty books in Polish, her work has been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. She has also translated the work of French Surrealists into Polish and curated exhibitions of Surrealist art.