Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one, : Tamsyn Farr, emily shafer + Yoko’s Dogs,

[Michael e. Casteels, Puddles of Sky Press]

Another small press fair, come and gone; and have you been catching my posts from the recent participation in both the TIFA Small Press Market and Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market? [see my first post on such here; see my second post here; see my third post here; see my fourth post here].

Wakefield/La Pêche QC: The latest from Pearl Pirie’s phafours is Crime & Ornament: poems (2025) by Tamsyn Farr [see her “six questions” interview from last year this time], a chapbook debut by the self-described “degenerate, straggler, marauder, buffoon, confidence trickster, latent criminal, pathological phenomenon, and poet who goes around Wakefield, Quebec, in velvet hose with gold braid like a fairground monkey.” I had a landlord back in the late 1990s who was the “Village poet” of Wakefield, I wonder if she knows Phil Cohen? “America was Kmart the Beautiful / when I was seven and in love / with Teddy Ruxpin.” she writes, to open the first poem “Cross Border Shopping,” a poem around memory, composed beneath the shadow of the current political climate. Her poems in this short collection offer depiction, response and memory, writing first-person poem-thoughts across narrative stretches, playful patter and sharp turns. Or, as the first quarter of the poem “Lovin It” reads: “Piercing gun cocked: pop goes / the sheen of a flat world // conspicuous, daubed / in all-angled light. // A footnote in the fiscal year / liquidates the wax museum // in some sun’s hollow centre. / Now two-thumbed hands // shake at rates reflecting / the cadences of the real world. // The death rattles’ goo goo / ga ga: the last dead giveaway.” I am intrigued by her use of political and cultural touchstones, riffing references and exploring multiple shapes and forms across this assemblage. I am curious to see what might come next, certainly.

Ornaments Wanted: Dead or Alive

On the mantle, a BBQ lighter. It came in a pack
of two: red and blue. Its long, flame-tipped finger
lights the fireplace. Left too close, it later catches
fire and explodes and leaves specks of soot over 

the whole goddamn house because that’s how hot
fire gets, hot enough to blow up the fire-maker
and ash-festoon every surface. And at the blue
fire’s centre is six months or years of sad and
unfiligreed time: to hose you down and feed you
peanuts, to talk to your druid therapist, to recall
that hangover nap on the toilet in a bathroom for
employees of the research unit of the psych
hospital, to be gainfully employed, to step into
the cold shower like a chest-beating Swede and
fantasize pleasantly about being fed into a wood
chipper. Mulch-me becomes the beadwork on
another disenchanted century. 

He wasn’t wrong to look for the ornament
embedded in the object. He wasn’t wrong that
fads lead to landfills adorned with dated kitchen
cabinetry. Every Hummel figurine is haunted.
Snipped from their forests, my indoor trees
yellow around me. 

(For the love of Christ, go water your plants).

Cobourg ON/New York NY: From Stuart Ross’ infamous Proper Tales Press comes New York City-based Rochester, New York poet emily shafer’s chapbook debut, it’s too early for poetry (2025). There’s a clarity to her lyric I find charming, a straightforwardness that still bends in the light, offering a slight pull on the line from gravity. Her poems really do feel akin to full-length sentence-thoughts, stretched across a canvas to shape across pause, interruptions, turns and twists. “Midnight ivy holds this house / together but I squeeze / out through the cracks,” she writes, as part of “the Munchmuseet,” “If you didn’t want to blossom, you should have told me so [.]”

August 

Jessica works at the Met
every day editing
exhibition photographs, so we go
out on weekends to some bar
in the Bronx for wings and syrup
-y soda. I can’t yet tell
if the waiter has had such
picky customers before, tearing
apart and rearranging the menu, but he seems
to mind
            only us.
At midnight I see the moon
over Van Courtland Park out the empty
train car window and she says
it looks like me and I rest
my head on her shoulder
            as the I train takes us home.

Montreal QC: I’ve long found collaborative quartet Yoko’s Dogs [Jan Conn, Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis and Jane Munro] a curious aberration, offering an ongoing conversation between a larger grouping of collaborators than the usual two or three, paired with the fact that they’re all individually well-established and published writers, and the fact of their sheer ongoingness, perhaps comparable only with their contemporary, Pain Not Bread [made up of the collaborative trio Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton]. Yoko’s Dogs formed in Montreal in 2006, and has since published titles including the full-length Whisk (Pedlar Press, 2013), and chapbooks Rhinoceros (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and Caution Tape (Collusion Books, 2021). Their latest is the chapbook Lunchbox Poems (Turret House Press, 2025), a title composed as an extended sequence of short, fragmented and accumulative lyric bursts. “can you put your feet up and relax,” they write, mid-way through the collection, “if the footstool is an anteater [.]” Their declared intention sits within the structure of the English-language haiku, but their lyric feels a bit more expansive than that, pulling at the boundaries of where the lyric meets a clipped, meditative density. Not straight haiku at all (again, in the adapted and otherwise imperfectly-translated English-language parlance of an original Japanese form), but something expansive, and ongoing. Not simply one small moment held, but held in a loose kind of sequence.

on the phone with my mother
I pull skin from
a slice of salami 

full snow moon, your other name is
hunger

Julie Carr, The Garden

 

            In the end, as at the beginning, I just wanted to think about the woman smoking at the planter’s edge.

 

 

The smoke leaves her mouth, widening like a firth before it enters mine. We breathe, we bathe, we feel each other’s heat. (“Garden”)

The latest collection from Denver poet Julie Carr is the book-length sequence The Garden (Pamenar Press/Essay Press, 2025), a curious structural counterpoint to the assemblage of self-contained and dense lyrics of her UNDERSCORE (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2024) [see my review of such here], a collection that, itself, feels as though it came out more recently than a full year ago. If the poems of UNDERSCORE worked a particular kind of packed density, the seven poem-sequence-sections of The Garden—“Garden,” “Flame,” “War,” “Door and Ladder,” “Blasts,” “Oftening, Over-and-Overing, Aftering” and “The Dancers”—provide an element of ongoingness, a book-length suite of pulled-apart lyric description; a first-person book-length lyric essay composed utilizing elements of prose poem and lyric structures. There’s almost a shared tonal quality, a lyric intimacy and declarative alongside a simultaneous critical distance, one can see that echoes works by such as Erín Moure, Anne Carson, Etel Adnan or Lisa Robertson. Carr writes, early in the opening sequence: “The cities inside our bodies kept our bodies alert—I sat at the café table and my eye / itched. Then my cheek preferred her cheek. I was aging as if a rock growing lichen by a / ruin. The apples fall, pungent and then brown—rot—as all along the hellstrips, child-sized / bathtubs—or coffins—with scarcely a foot between, deter rest.” There’s almost an element of a timeless placement, anchored in a temporal and perpetual present. As the poem continues, further down the same page:

            Because I am allergic to wine, I drink it. From crown to vulva, I am poisoned—a mild intransigence against the self. These once vigorous clouds with their collapsing fibrous folds.

Sections move across the collection, akin to chapters, held together as a single, extended lyric mode of thinking and examining threads of art, desire, family, family history, writing and reading and friends, a pendulum of memory and her immediate present.

            Something was opening and at the same time remained lost, as my friend the playwright wrote. In Boston,
her girls licked their sugar sticks. 

 

            *

 

But in fact, I was interested in them—the angels, the malakim, or “messengers,” those between beings (laying waste to the categories)—as now, back at home, I found my mouth burning as if a fever of the tongue. The machine had crashed to freeze a man’s face, offering a prolonged view of the future, the static future where his generally youthful expression would turn ghastly, mouth agape, pupils like unseeing stones. Meanwhile, in the man’s bedroom where he somewhat was, time was continuing to move in ordinary beats. There, his unastonished voice had said new things, things about budgets and plans that he had in fact said before and would
            say again

Moving through this assemblage, this is a deeply complex layering of subject matter, with different elements moving in and out of focus. At certain point, the book suggests a foundation of family, and family history; at other points, art and writing and friends; of pause, of slowness; of loss, of death and mourning an immediate peer; further on, an underlay of a history of fascism, as it pertains to art, writing and to her own family history. And throughout, repeatedly and occasionally referencing Yoko Ono, as a kind of anchor. “It was all, as we all knew,” she writes, mid-point, “temporary. As Yoko Ono had said, if you carry stones the city will look lighter; if you carry enough stones, eventually the whole city will float away.” The swirls and layerings are brilliantly coherent, held together in amber across such incredible distance, each layer adding to the richness of the book as a unified whole. “With this / attitude of attenuation,” she writes, near the end of the collection, “I’d been reading the letters the now-dead poet had written from her seat on the patio of a rented house on an island.” Or, in the fourth section, writing:

            A lover of the ballet and of books, he’d especially loved a type of book not a lot of other people love—that is, reference books, especially book-length bibliographies, which was strange to thin kabout since those are the books most speedily outdated and that are only useful to people who, by using them to write about their research subjects, are eagerly contributing to their obsolences.

Carr is the author of a whole slew of previous titles, including Mead: An Epithalamion (University of Georgia Press, 2004), Equivocal (Alice James Books, 2007), 100 Notes on Violence (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2010; Omnidawn, 2023), Sarah-Of Fragments and Lines (Coffee House Press, 2010), Rag (Omnidawn, 2014) [see my review of such here], Think Tank (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2015) [see my review of such here], Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Ahsahta Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Real Life: An Installation (Oakland CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2018) [see my review of such here], as well as the collaborative Climate (with Lisa Olstein; Essay Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. Her author biography also offers this curious tidbit, at the end: “Overflow, a trilogy, will be published sequentially over the next few years.” Is this collection part of that trio of titles? I couldn’t find anything within this particular title to suggest it might be, but it does make me wonder. What is “Overflow”?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Susanna Crossman

Susanna Crossman [photo credit: Morgane Michotte] is an essayist and award-winning fiction writer. Her acclaimed memoir, Home is Where We Start: Growing Up In The Fallout of The Utopian Dream, was published by Fig Tree, Penguin, in 2024. She has recent work in Aeon, The Guardian, Paris Review, Vogue, and more. A published novelist in France, she regularly collaborates with artists. When she’s not writing, she works on three continents as a lecturer and clinical arts-therapist. Born in the UK, Susanna Crossman grew up in an international commune and now lives in France with her partner and three daughters.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Like lots of writers, my literary career hasn’t been linear and has taken me across countries, genres and languages. But each book, essay and prize has changed my life. When my first novel l’île sombre was published in France I toured around literary festivals with great interviews and events and it felt very much like coming home- finding my people. My acclaimed memoir, Home Is Where We Start: Growing Up in The Fallout of The Utopian Dream is the story of my utopian commune childhood, so the publication was more emotional but equally exhilarating.  The book was published by Penguin and attracted huge press/media coverage, and was reviewed in all the UK newspapers: the Times, Observer, The Mirror, The Spectator, the TLS etc. I feel very lucky. 

The Orange Notebooks has taken me back to the world of fiction ( I actually wrote it before my memoir but it came out afterwards). It’s the story of a mother coming to terms with the loss of her child. I am really happy to have this book out in the UK and North America, as an exploration of the persistence of love in the face of loss. With all my books I am drawn to the tragedies of being human but also our incredible capacity for love, humour and hope.

2 - How did you come to memoir first, as opposed to, say, fiction or poetry?

I write essays, shorts stories, novels and non-fiction, and have also written plays. However, since I was young I’ve been inspired by visual artists like Charlotte Salmon, Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin who make work linked to their life. I don’t think of it as a therapeutic process, rather that the realities are closely bound to each other. I love writing non-fiction and fiction, but they are different forms to me.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I am a very productive writer and rarely suffer from writers block, so I produce a lot of work fast. However I edit and redraft a lot. When I wrote The Orange Notebooks I knew the beginning and end - but not what happened in between. I needed to write to find out the story but also get to know the characters and discover the themes. Many readers comment on how layered my books are, and I think that is a reflection of the process.

4 - Where does a work of memoir or fiction begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

From the start, I tend to know whether a piece will be book, short story or an essay. However, I do like using shorter forms to experiment and play with an idea. My memoir, Home Is Where We Start, was originally an essay: The Utopian Machine (Aeon), that went viral in 2022. Parts of The Orange Notebooks were based on experimental prose poems that I performed for Sagam Poetry reinterpreting the Orphic myth.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

As I trained in Drama, and worked as an actress I really enjoy readings and have made performance pieces based on my work. I love the spoken voice.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I suppose I am trying to look at what it’s like to be alive, how we juggle rational and irrational thought, life and death, conflict and love, looking after this green planet?  I wonder what it was like to be alive one hundred or a thousand years ago and the difference today. I want to explore what makes us human.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think the role of the writer is to write about what moves you, and to be open to the world and what is happening today in all its horror and its glory, and write about the things that make your heart beat faster.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I find it essential to work with editors and feel privileged to have worked with some amazing people. With each editorial process I feel like I learn more about my writing. Fresh eyes on a text are vital.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Read to write.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (memoir to essays to short stories to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

I see it all as writing, but one form can definitely stimulate the other. For example, in The Orange Notebooks I include factual information about bees, colours, trauma and other themes and learnt from my memoir about how to weave information into a braided narrative.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I am writing full-time at the moment, and tend to dither first thing, check emails, make coffee, drift… Then once I get started I’ll write for about 4-5 hours. I don’t like to eat too much ( or like Borges only very plain food so it doesn’t distract me), so I just focus on the words. Similarly I only use brown notebooks. If I am writing a first draft, I try to finish the day at a point where the story is exciting, so I’ll feel motivated when I start the next day. If I’m editing I’ll try to get to the end of a chapter. I give myself small goals to achieve and that keeps me moving. I also love, love, love working in libraries. I wrote a lot of The Orange Notebooks in my local library.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I read a lot, and if I have a writing dilemma I’ll go for a long walk. I developed this practice during a residency in a Scottish castle where I edited The Orange Notebooks – asking myself one question about my manuscript, and then walking and thinking, and an hour later I’d usually found the answer.

For all stages, I often use visuals hand-drawn aids like charts, mind maps – I love Sellotape and coloured pens. This was really useful with The Orange Notebooks as the novel is made up of a fragmented diary entries with time shifts, so it was important to keep track of the balance within the novel.

 I find switching from screen to paper very helpful to undo writing problems. I write by hand and using a computer. I teach a course with London Lit Lab on how to use other art forms to unblock writing.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of books.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Everything feeds into my work, but probably visual art, science and philosophy have the strongest influence.  These are intertwined in the narrative of The Orange Notebooks.  As Anna, the heroine, navigates grief and trauma, she and those around will turn to science and particularly neuropsychiatry to try and understand her behaviour. The book references the visual arts through Anna’s obsession with colour and what she describes as “the duplicity of beige”, and philosophy as an attempt to understand disaster. She also becomes obsessed with bees and climate change as a metaphor to her own tragedy.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

In parallel to my writing, I’ve worked in state hospitals for most of my life as a clinical arts-therapist, supervisor and lecturer. It’s given me a huge sense of meaning and also a great humility about life in general as for both staff and patients being and working in hospital requires daily management of disaster and suffering.  Hospitals have taught me to engage with hope, because, as André Malraux says, without hope you cannot breathe.

This work has been a major influence on The Orange Notebooks as a book reclaiming the lost language of mourning. Many end-of-life doctors and carers now recognise, and as Anna writes, “We needed to keep death in life. We couldn’t banish it underground. But we had to connect with each other, make our own new stories, mix the living and the dead. Invent our rituals. Embrace it all. “

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d like to do a sabbatical year teaching writing in a university abroad ( please invite me – I will come!). I love teaching! I also have a zillion books in my mind that I need to write, and am currently writing full-time. 

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Sometimes I think I would like to have been a spy. I love being in cities on my own, incognito.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? 

I taught myself to read when I was about three and a half and have written and read since voraciously since I was small child. However, I’ve also worked as an actress and been involved in visual art and performance, and work in hospitals. But really writing is at the core of everything. In The Orange Notebooks, Anna and her husband are also avid readers. She writes, “We knew that once you were inside a single book it led to other books. Each single book was a library, a universe. Long ago, word after word fell in a delicate rain, and the words became a lake from which we drew our water.” 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I am currently a judge for the Queen Mary Fiction Prize for Small Presses so am reading some amazing books but sadly I am sworn to secrecy so I can’t tell you about those. As part of my research for my next novel, I just finished A Place of Greater Safety (set during the French Revolution) by Hilary Mantel – It’s 900 pages long, but brilliant to understand how idealism and brutal political reality co-exist.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am working on two books: a non-fiction book about care, a kind of a collective hymn to the invisible acts that keep us all afloat, and a historical fiction novel set during the period of The Terror in the French Revolution. The latter is a page-turning adventure, set between France and the UK focusing on how everyday people navigate periods of violent political upheaval.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

MC Hyland, Walks & Weathers

 

You said I’m trying
to keep this walk light
because you are generous
and did not want
to tire me. We saw
your old bicycle still
chained to the fence.
How does it feel
I should have asked
to have left that place?
Not the crisis but
the aftermath to leave
rooms you love in &
came home to. Last
night the story how
you lost your way
in Tokyo & the woman
who guided you home.
Today a day of places
we had been before
was this the place
you brought those
doughuts the morning
after your wedding? (“A Walk / For Stephanie Anderson / Logan Square / Chicago IL / August 19, 2015”)

Very good to see a new poetry title (and a second full length collection by the same author this year alone) by St. Paul, Minnesota-based poet, editor and publisher MC Hyland, her Walks & Weathers (Beauty School Editions, 2025), following THE END (Sidebrow Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press, 2010) [see my review of such here] and The Dead & The Living & The Bridge (Chicago IL: Meekling Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], as well as a handful of chapbooks (including one through above/ground press). Subtitled “(Publishing Experiments 2015-2019),” Walks & Weathers is constructed in two sections—the lengthy assemblage “PART 1: WALKS” and shorter “PART 2: WEATHERS.”

The opening section, making up three-quarters of the collection, is an accumulation of twenty-nine walks, each with dedication, date and location. Hyland’s notes at the end of the collection reaffirm what the book already suggests: a durational influence from the work of the late American poet Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022), a poet that has come up before in Hyland’s work. I find it interesting how Mayer’s influence of writing from an immediate activity, whether walking, or simply the diaristic/journal poetic, is so prevalent in the work of both Hyland and her DoubleCross Press co-hort, Anna Gurton-Wachter [see my review of Gurton-Wachter’s latest here]. As Hyland’s poem “A Walk,” subtitled “For Amelia Foster / Hidden Falls Park / St. Paul MN / June 28, 2016,” begins: “Sometimes finding / your way to / the river is the / problem: does the / river curve like / a question / made passing / through the / cities? Finding / the question is / a kind of / listening / which is what / you say you / do.” There is something uniquely interesting in this kind of poetic, one of attending, and listening, as opposed to declaring; one that follows what seemed foundational for Mayer, for example, so well. And the poetics of walking is well-trod, variations including the flâneur of New York City poet Frank O’Hara and Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire to more recent examples, including Hudson Valley, New York poet Stacy Szymaszek’s ongoing work [see my review of their latest here], Vancouver poet Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005), Leicestershire, England poet and sound artist Mark Goodwin’s Steps (Sheffield UK: Longbarrow Press, 2014) [see my review of such here], Cole Swensen’s On Walking On (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2017) [see my review of such here], Jill Magi’s SPEECH (Nightboat Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], Edmonton poet Matthew James Weigel’s Whitemud Walking (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022) [see my review of such here] or Laura Moriarty’s Which Walks (Nightboat Books, 2025) [see my review of such here]. Still, Hyland’s walks offer an immediacy, even an intimacy, through such meditative walks, composing through a series of prompts closer to Meyer through her own projects walking and writing, a sentence per block. “The sky / so empty & so blue.” she writes, for the poem for Deborah Stein, composed “Prospect Park / Brooklyn, NY / September 5, 2015” “I want to know / how to be in the world, / how to make a space / where being with someone / is the only agenda. Love / hasn’t taught me this / but maybe my feet will.” Further in the same poem, as she offers: “Adultery / is one way women / our age declare / their brilliance in / literature.” Given how each piece through this structure is dedicated to a different friend, many, if not most or all, are also writers, I would be curious to know if there are trace elements from any of the work of these writers, although certainly a trail of responses from that immediate walk, offering threads of story, geography and conversation. Each extended lyric, with poems continuing along three or four pages or more, through this opening stretch exists as a response to that walk. As her walk for Maria Damon, “Flatbush Avenue / Brooklyn, NY / Setpember 21, 2017,” begins: “A whole new / economy / is a temptation. / I have been / thinking, twisting / Bernadette Mayer / to my own uses. / In Feminist / Reading Group / at the Project / we go around / naming our utopias. / Mine is a set of / practices geared / to peel me back / from cash economies, / through the / small-change / detournement / you practice is / I think maybe / another small / kind.”

I’m curious as to how this particular collection cites itself as “Publishing Experiments,” beyond my own speculations upon a potential uncertainty or unease by the author as to how this might hold together, between one section and the next, a concern doesn’t hold. The only real information comes through the notes at the end, suggesting that certain of these pieces might have been composed for the possibility of particular publication, whether in limited edition chapbook form or something other, but that doesn’t appear to have made any overt or obvious difference upon the writing itself, beyond the possibility of prompt, such as her “Essay on Weather,” a piece written from email prompt, that begins: “I wanted to know about time, about change. My body had acquired certain ongoing pains. An effect of normal wear and tear, said the physician. On the bedside table, a history of extinction and a phone that imbibed one crisis after another from the seemingly neutral air. Even slow violences hurled toward reckoning, time puckered and creased under many ineluctable pressures.” In certain ways, the pieces in the second section—an essay that opens into an extended, lyric sequence—a response to a particular temporal moment, offering a meditative aggregate open enough to allow the whole of the world, in that particular moment, in. As the poem begins, opening:

I wanted a language for passion
            that involved no touches
to a body. The day gave me
            A calmly breathing sky.
Husbandmen’s and Mariners’
            confused mass of simple aphorisms.
Something like a silence
            composed of many quiet songs.
Thin wisps of cirrus striate
            the north. This record keeping
inadequate to the fluidities
            of time. A man’s voice urged me
to carry this awareness. Ocean’s
            shooting pH. Buoy’s semi-regular moan.
This stillness felt empty, but was filled
            with progressions.
Into the eighteenth-century gap
            between aphorism and system,
a philosopher’s Methodical nomenclaturearrives. Some part
            of the day still opens
inside your breath. Cargo ships
            like small cities on the horizon.
As in the paintings of Claude Lorrain,
            bright distance pulls the eye.