Don't miss five new poems by AB Gorham at www.ADozenNothing.com!

These poems feel like spells. This book leads me to Lisa Jarnot’s A Princess Magic Presto Spell which is where I stomp through puddles. I love a constraint!

I love the strangeness of its syntax and the objects of a life that run through the poems. The language also feels akin to Gertrude Stein: shifting subjects and objects, repetition (insistence).

Also, Stacy Doris’ Fledge. I love the constraints of this book, the way it collaborates with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Paul Celan’s poems.

This book, and Wright’s work in general, has profoundly affected my writing and therefore likely me as a person. The book was and remains a beautiful mystery. I wrote C.D. Wright a letter once and she sent me back a postcard in the mail!

A: C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining. I first read this book in Casey Charles’ Verse Novel class in undergrad at The University of Montana. I then read it another five times that year.

I am reading books about moiré, books about optical illusions, books about the history of printing.

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Don't miss new poems by AB Gorham at www.ADozenNothing.com!

While different from my projects based in UFOlogy, this artist book also engages with experimental text, visual and cultural phenomenon, the traditional book production to create a new experiential object. The research for this project has been fun.

It’s called Exotic Quantum States #17 and employs optical illusions, poetry, and cutouts in an accordion structure. This artist book will be letterpress printed and bound by hand in an edition.

A: I am about to start print production on an artist book that uses moiré as the visual lens through which imagery and text are revealed and understood.

I recently read Bridget Talone’s A Soft Life (and you should too!) which reminded me how fun an abstraction or language-driven beginning can be as a way to introduce the poem’s puzzle without the overt strictness of a thesis statement.

A: It’s okay to ditch your first line. What got you into the poem in the first place doesn’t always need to stay.

In fact, if you don’t know Rasheed’s work, I implore you to seek it out right now! Or finish the next few sentences and then seek it out! Her brilliant work brings text (language) off the page and into the architecture, activates archives, arranges notes into complex visual compositions.

Harmony Holiday’s Hollywood Forever, Karen Green’s Bough Down, Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton, Anne Carson’s Nox (what an object!), anything by Kameelah Jannan Rasheed.

A: I would like to list a few books that are working spectacularly with text and imagery. Maybe I will make a trade book artist book one day and if so, then I have been inspired by these books:

These landscapes remind me of the work of Virginia Jaramillo, an artist I admire.

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Don't miss new poems by AB Gorham, all month at www.ADozenNothing.com.

Sarah Gridley’s poems in Weather Eye Open do not present a season but they do drag me (face down and face up) through a landscape and the rocks have ancient names and the windmills make the light stutter across the hills.

Or return to the poem and search for meaning in a new way. The language of the poem is iridescent.