Friday, February 13, 2026

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Paul Moorehead

Paul Moorehead is a writer and physician living in Conception Harbour, Newfoundland and Labrador with his partner, their three children, and their one cat. His poetry has appeared in Pinhole Poetry, Riddle Fence, Horseshoe Literary Magazine, newpoetry.ca, and other places. His debut poetry collection, Green, was published by Breakwater Books in 2025. 

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

The nice thing about writing a book of poetry is that there is no temptation toward any outsize expectations. My book is not going to be a bestseller, nobody is going to make it into a show for a streaming service. So I just get to enjoy the book, that it exists, that I wrote it, that it occasionally finds its way into the hands of someone who might connect with it. I wrote a book! Of poetry! If my life is different in some way, it’s that I feel more like a writer now than I did before the book. Which is encouraging: if I'm a writer, then I can write more. Maybe there’s another book in me.

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

My writing dreams have always been of writing fiction and essays. But during the pandemic I did some online poetry workshops with a friend, George Murray. I’d always been a little wary of poetry, both as a reader and a writer, but I came to it at just the right moment, I think, and in just the right setting, with a very supportive mentor and a very welcoming community.

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?

Starting things is easy and quick. Most of those things die pretty quickly, although usually that’s a form of mercy killing. (I have a few partially finished novels in my “drawer”; they should probably never be seen by human eyes.) Once I’m on to something that I think has some force, the writing can come quickly. I wrote the poems that would eventually become Green, plus a bunch that did not end up in the book, in about two years, and that was starting from zero miles per hour as a poet. I’m a bit of an editor/revisor, so things often change pretty substantially from first concept to final version.

4 - Where does a poem usually 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?

My book, Green, was formed from individual poems that I wrote as I was beginning to learn to write poetry. There was no idea, at least not at the beginning, that these poems could or would become a book. What I’m working on now is a little more coherent around a concept.

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

I like doing readings, although I find reading for people to be emotional. I’m trying to get better at reading my work aloud. So many poets, even very accomplished ones, are not very good at reading. They come off as disinterested, perhaps they’re trying to let the work speak for itself, without the need for any kind of human vector. Must be nice to be so convinced of the genius of one’s work. But I’d like to get better at having the reading bring something extra that creates a temporary version of the poem that is not just the printed words.
I’m very attentive to the sound of my poems, so I’m often thinking as I write about whether a piece could be usefully be read aloud. In that sense, the possibility of reading guides what I’m doing on the page. Not that I won’t write a poem that can’t be read aloud, but if I have an idea that a particular piece might be one I’d read, I need to make sure that it stays that way.

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’m trying to write a poetry of “what is”, at the risk of seeming like some kind of antiquated rational materialist. (Guilty.) What you believe has consequences: if you believe in the literal existence of Santa, you need to wrestle with the existence of the surveillance apparatus implied by that belief, you need to acknowledge that this authority in which you believe prefers rich kids, and so on.

So I’m trying to write about the marvellous world we live in, which means that I write about natural phenomena, often through the explanatory lens of science. I deliberately avoid mysticism, metaphysics, spiritualism, and other forms of woo that are pretty commonplace in contemporary poetry. But I don’t think that the transcendent and the numinous — the truly wonderful — are the property of those modes of thinking. I’m trying to write about what it’s like to be in this world, to live in it, to experience its aesthetics and poetics. This is a bit different than the way that many poets write about science and nature: either the natural phenomenon is used solely as a metaphor, as in “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, or the poem is a hymn to the phenomenon. (Grossly oversimplifying here.) I’m trying to do something different with my poetry, to write about the world as it is and about our experience of it.

Adjacent to this is a technical question I’m interested in, which has to do with how poems might be constructed differently. If we imagine that words and lines are the atoms and molecules, respectively, of poetry, what happens if we do chemistry with these? If we pull them apart and put them together. This experiment already exists in poetry, of course, in, for example, enjambment or Manley Hopkins-esque portmanteaux. But how far can this be pushed? To what poetic end? Do there exist poetic polymers and macromolecules? What do they look like? What are they for?

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?

Truth is taking a beating from all sides these days. So the role of writers of all kinds ought to be to tell the truth. But to tell it wisely and beautifully.

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

I really like revising and editing, so working with an editor can be a really generative experience, so long as the editor has an idea of what I’m trying to do. Poetry is a good space in which to find such editors. (My other publishing experience is in academic medicine, where the “editorial” process consists of some pretty ham-fisted copyediting and the dubious activity of peer review. The aim of most peer reviewers seems to be to convince you that your work is dumb and that you’re ignorant. It’s not hard to understand the smallness and insecurity that lead to these attitudes, but these traits seem harder to find in the poetry community than in the academy or in medicine.)

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Writing advice? In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott, using the metaphor of chopping firewood, advises to “aim through the wood”. Have some idea of what you’re trying to do, and swing as hard as you can to do it, swing through the resistance of the task itself.

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

Routine? That’s funny. I have a day job, although I’m on leave at the moment, and three small kids. I snatch moments for writing when I can. The dream is a life that allows more space for writing, where I could have something resembling a routine for writing and reading.

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

I don’t often get stalled, honestly. There are just too many ideas. (That’s something beautiful about poetry: you can write a poem about the elasticity of nice socks much more readily than you could write a screenplay about the same thing.) The world we live in is so varied, so detailed, so deep, how could you run out of ideas? My problem is finding the time to get what’s in my head out onto the page. Which is one of them good problems, I suppose.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cats. Waffles. A nice Irish whiskey.

13 - 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?

Nature and the use of science to attempt to understand it, absolutely. I love music, although I don’t know that my work is particularly musical. I love stories in nearly all forms (musical theatre being the exception) and some of my poetry has a narrative element. I would love to write a big epic poem.

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

This will be a woefully incomplete listing. I’m learning a lot from Paul Muldoon. Dean Young, although I’m not really interested in trying to write that kind of surrealism; his approach to lining and pacing are wonderful. Robyn Hitchcock is a musician I love, not least because of the poetry of his lyrics. Ditto for Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. Sue Goyette is my favourite Canadian poet, I think, and the audacity of her work is really inspiring. When I think about trying to write an epic poem, Goyette is the contemporary poet I think about.

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

Write a second book. A really good one. Or maybe a really good third book.

16 - 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?

I’ve been a math teacher, and I’m currently a physician. I should have been a physicist, but fear and laziness prevented this. Some days I think I’d like to be a Zamboni driver, or the guy who drives the rake around the infield at a baseball stadium.

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

I don’t know. But something makes me write. Something that is very unhappy when I’m not writing. It’s been there since I was a kid. It’s been pretty unhappy a lot of the time, unfortunately, until recently. I’m trying to feed it better now.

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

Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet is an absolutely wonderful ode to the power of art. I don’t know if it’s the last great book that I read, but Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth is a fantastic examination of Orwell’s 1984. We should all be reading 1984 on repeat at the moment.

19 - What are you currently working on?

A few things. I’m putting together the poems that I hope will be a second book. And I’m working on several chapbook-length things, one about water, another about hockey, and a third about a French mathematician. Trying to get my author’s website up and running — I’m not technically inept but I find it hard to be bothered with this kind of thing — and trying to get a Substack about Marvel movies on the go as well.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Thursday, February 12, 2026

Three Count Pour Chapbooks : Elizabeth Robinson + Randy Prunty,

 

baptism

What if a hand

came from behind,

 

if it wetted the hair. A gesture that neither 

understood nor misunderstood

 

what the hand could measure

when the sound was not water, was

 

instead

the fall of nakedness from

the body. The surrender, the squander, the thing

that could not adhere, submerged below its surface. (Elizabeth Robinson)

I’m intrigued by these lovely new chapbooks by American poets Elizabeth Robinson and Randy Prunty, apparently two of a cluster of four new chapbooks by Bay Area poets produced in 2025 by Three Count Pour, an imprint of Chicago publisher selva obscura pressRobinson’s for the catechists (2025) and Prunty’s Gravity Catches All Things (2025). Elizabeth Robinson is the author of a slew of poetry books and chapbooks over the past two-plus decades—see my review of her latest, vulnerability index (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2025), for example—and this new title follows her relatively more recent trajectory into elements of faith, offering lyric conversations through and around scripture. What is interesting, also, is how the book is structured as a kind of abecedarian, offering fourteen lettered section-clusters, most of which hold but one or two poems, but the section “s” holding six poems, with all poem titles within each section beginning with that section’s featured letter. That same “s” section, for example, offering poems “sacred heart,” “shofar,” “shroud,” “sola scriptura,” “soul” and “spirit.” The abecedarian structure hints, perhaps, at a far larger collection of these pieces, which is interesting, and something I would be eager to see. Robinson’s language is sharp and dense, and there’s an approach to and through her subject matter propelled, first and foremost, through the language. “Echolalic with odor,” she writes, as part of the poem “carnal,” “the creature is able to smile, to fill / countenance with perception, mill / its arms around, its legs, loll or hunt / its field, its plural. /// Critter in fur, incarnate howl, / call, mineral tang of voice, voice stalled. Its / whiff transferred, diurnal. Only paw and pall, little /// hell of beingness, crawl to haven.” I haven’t seen much of Randy Prunty’s work prior to this, but the title of his Gravity Catches All Things is quite good, I must say. The pieces assembled here are composed as fourteen word/line sonnets, one word per line, what Ottawa poet Seymour Mayne has referred to as “word sonnets,” although Prunty’s are far more precise, exact. There’s such thinking between these lines, these words; such marvellous density, one word set upon another, offering a kind of silence throughout each piece, even as the poem speaks. One hopes that, or even wonders if, Prunty’s reading style allows for the line breaks, the spaces between words, and not the way Canadian poet Ken Norris once told me of the reading style of American poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963): reading sans line break, as though his poems but a kind of ongoing sentence, making one wonder why those line breaks were even there at all.

Back Porch Sonnet

When
there’s
no
space
between
thinking
it
and
saying
it,
you
know
you’re
home.

 

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

the schedule for the sixteenth annual edition of VERSeFest : Ottawa's International Poetry Festival is now online!

March 24-30, 2026: readings and performances in English and French (and Polish!) by Marie-Célie Agnant, Olivia Tapiero, Sanita Fejzic, Melissa Powless Day, David Galvaude, Robyn Sarah, Claudia Coutu Radmore, D.A. Lockhart, Gwen Aube, T Liem, Lucia Farinon, Isabella Wang, Sheri-D Wilson, Misha Solomon, Emma McKenna, Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Vera Hadzic, Jennifer Baker, Paul Vermeersch, Jérôme Melancon, Hajer Mirwali, Stephanie Bolster, Declan Ryan, Brandi Bird, Sébastien Rock, Lydia Unsworth, Nada Gordon, Jumoke Verissimo, Karen Solie, Alexandre Yergeau and Kacper Bartczak!

Two new Hall of Honour inductees! (we're keeping who they might be a secret for now)
workshops by Sheri-D Wilson and Paul Vermeersch! and a free reading at Carleton University by Karen Solie!

check out the full schedule and ticket information at https://verseottawa.ca/en/versefest

 

 

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

12 or 20 (second series) questions with B.J. Soloy

BJ Soloy is the author of Birth Center in Corporate Woods (2025, Black Lawrence Press), Our Pornography & other disaster songs (2019, Slope Editions), and the chapbook Selected Letters (2016, New Michigan Press). With stuff recently in places like Painted Bride Quarterly, At Length, and Gigantic Sequins, he teaches at a community college and a women's prison near Des Moines, Iowa, home of The Whatever.

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

My first book, Our Pornography & other disaster songs, came out into the world in 2019 and didn't immediately blow open all the locked doors or give me a backstage pass to the scene, but it did feel real good. I got the email letting me know it won the Slope Editions Book Prize on my  classroom computer in between classes at the community college where I was teaching outside of Kansas City. I mostly swallowed my joy and taught some stuff, but it was a big deal to me. Ocean Vuong, who selected the manuscript, wrote a really generous introduction and I got to do my official book release reading at a Rodney Dangerfield-themed bar in Portland, OR with some badass writers. So, even though the world shut down within a year, I call it a win. This second book, Birth Center in Corporate Woods, feels like it's on the other side of a fat gulf. In between the two, COVID hit, I had a kid, my partner's been transitioning, we moved to Des Moines, and that's all bled in--at least in roundabout ways--to the more recent work. Though the first book was ostensibly a book-length poem and this one has discrete pieces, the new stuff feels more cohesive. They both blend personal, capital, pop cultural, but Birth Center seems to show more breadth and accidental daring. Recency bias exists, but it still seems more like an album to me.

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

I got my dead grandpa's old desk when I was, like, eleven, and it seemed wrong that it was empty. Its thin little skeletal drawers. I started writing little things on some notecards and keeping them in there, like newspaper people in movies with their papers and such. I mean, I have a desk. So I had this idea of being a writer early. I was mostly a sketcher, though, into high school, then it was almost a sort of synesthesia. I kept sketch diaries for years and years and image slowly gave way to words. My eyes retreated. A Shakespeare class in high school gave me the sonnets (at the time, I moved into our damp basement, acquired my best friend Josh's sister's yellow bed frame, and wrote Sonnet 60 on the side). When I started college as a visual artist, a class on attention introduced me to Schuyler. In my first poetry workshop at a now-extinct liberal arts school in St. Louis, I got Alan Dugan. Angie Estes and Kathy Fagan came and read at that school. The more I heard people writing about kicking rocks down the road or ducks walking into bars or trees as slo-mo explosions, the more my elliptical, faux song lyric, compulsive notes seemed like they might have family.

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?

3 (though I'm really answering 4 too). I try not to/can't successfully do projects™ very often. I've had a couple of exceptions with my first chapbook (a book of letters) and an elegy project for my dad, but mostly I can't compel myself to write to a theme or singular idea without boring myself into a torpor in an unpleasant way. I tried writing to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, but it was shitty. I invented a form, the Birdy-Lou, and tried to write a bunch, but it went flat fast. I'll probably keep challenging myself with projects and then swiftly failing, but about all of my work that, well, works slowly congeals. Scraps accumulate and I edit toward one poem. Poems accumulate and I start to pair them off. I rewrite by hand, over and over, forcing myself to see if it sticks. Eighty lines will whittle themselves down to eight and repeat. The eights add up and echoes start to emerge and after the bunches of poems turn to bunches of bunches, I'll print the whole mess off, spread it on the floor, and start editing for a manuscript.

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

Readings have become important to me. Maybe it's my experience as a musician and/or a teacher, but it feels more real, alive, fragile when received in person. My droll, boringly Midwestern voice is pretty close to my internalized narrator's, but the poems feel different. So, yes: I enjoy readings. And I enjoy reading with other people. Some folks I've read with many times; most I'm reading with for the first time. It's humbling and electric to be in a space and of a 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?

As with subject matter, a lot of the theoretical concerns I surely use seep in without being explicitly invited. I've thought a lot about apostrophe and the construction of the mutable "I." The inherent postmodern distrust of clean meaning making is there. Werner Herzog's definition of poetry as "ecstatic truth" haunts them. As does a sense of the uncanny and the sublime, which I think can actually swallow the reflexive skepticism and turn it into something more generative. A cultural studies conflation of the high/low and the formal/informal (there all along in haiku, Eliot, Niedecker's amazing calendars) is a constant whisper.

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'm loath to make any broad proclamations about the role of anyone, but I'm tempted to think about comedians/fools and all that. Right now, though, especially in the Trump era and its clear goal of censorship through pre-compliance and the chilling effect aimed at media companies, law firms, institutions of higher education, etc., a writer's ability to tell it slant, (Write it!) like disaster, etc. can be a real call to action. Maybe we have less to lose (no one reads poetry), but there's a freedom in that. In teaching Danez Smith, Brenda Hillman's "Describing Tattoos to a Cop," Rankine's Just Us, or Valeria Lusielli's Lost Children Archive, I feel the writer's ability to both distill and complicate things (topics/events/humanity) that have become so watery and boringly, lucratively provocative in social media's sad realms.

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

My editors have been blessedly hands-off, making sure the named people in my poems won't sue and going over consistency and sentence-level concerns, but they seem to trust that I've spent way too much time on every little phrase and punctuation choice to casually suggest reworking things to taste. I, honestly, love it when people come at my work, scalpels or flamethrowers in hand, but haven't had much wrasslin' from the presses.

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

Ed Roberson said lots of amazing things, but a throwaway line about finding good readers outside of school has turned out to be invaluable. I don't have the trading pages at a bar scene I did for years, but I find myself today with three pieces from friends awaiting some feedback and some pieces of my own to send away soon. I haven't been in a real workshop in—counts rings in trunk—thirteen years, but I know who I'll show my stuff to. Runner-up: "Never trust a man in a blue trench coat / Never drive a car when you're dead."

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

This is where I'm old. My son wakes me up at 5:45 - 6:05, throwing Slothy the sloth and Fluffy the stingray onto our bed. My writing used to be done chronically, if never on schedule, but now it's purely opportunistic, running trickles of lines until they pool. I occasionally get a schedule (stop by GT in Des Moines on Monday nights after teaching my prison evening class and work on edits for an hour), or a habit (I started spreading out on the floor by the record player at night when everyone else went to sleep), but I'm feeling the need to get official (I have a new challenge/drawing restraint/party with my pal and great poet, Philip Schaefer: we're to write one new line each day, starting next week).

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

Honestly, sometimes it's so insultingly simple as just being, like, "It's poetry night."  I might need to bump sleep, grading, some plans, but I see it's been too long and just claim some time. Having a notebook handy after much driving and erring always on the side of "this is probably stupid, but..." help a lot too. For me, it's never about inspiration or intention but just dumb time management.

12 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

When our little dude was even littler, we went full Raising Arizona. I grew and then shaved down to a Nicolas Cage mustache. With a Holly Hunter nightgown and some alternative Huggies, we could turn to the left and get our pictures taken as one.

13 - 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?

Driving and being in unfamiliar "comfy" places (e.g. a Vrbo cabin or in someone's kitchen) can influence a tone. Subtitles on films--even silenced English-language stuff, minimally creepy eavesdropping, and, of course, music all do things.

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

I've been affected by the difficult men I love (Denis Johnson, Jack Spicer) and have some constants (Alice Notley, Larry Levis, Jean Valentine) but tend to spend more time with a rotation of three of four books I'll take with me as a group, reading them together until trading them in for a new mix. Right now, it's Natalie Shapero, Bernadette Mayer, John Berger, and a book of historical film criticism I'm kind of reading for a class. Lots of fiction and lots of records end up being important as they stick with me on whatever I'm doing.

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

Maybe act.

16 - 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?

If I hadn't ended up wherever I'm at, there were some interesting paths pointing off in other directions. I've worked as a film projectionist, a line cook, a veterinary technician, and was in some bands that were having fun, but maybe I'd work for the USPS.

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

I still play music and keep a pile of collage materials, but writing seemed to take over--maybe in part--because it's free and always there, my writing voice is better than my singing voice, and I, you know, like it.

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

I just saw One Battle after Another and Train Dreams within a week of each other and like them both and, this last year, I finally read Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers and it just overwhelmed me. Like, it has a physical effect on me six months after finishing it.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I've started gathering a bunch of the stray sections and finished short pieces I've been slowly popping out over the last year or two and looking at it all together. (Post-)COVID, Trump-era cultural context is probably obvious, but it's delightfully all over the place. After hacking away the clear nopes, it's at forty-ish pages, but half of those will probably go live with a nice family upstate, on a farm, with lots of room to run around and no such thing as death.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Monday, February 09, 2026

Youna Kwak, For This and Other Cruelties

 

I am preparing to write a book
about the death of the mother. To write
such a book requires a mother
who does something remarkable or real
in an apprehensible way, or 

a secretive mother
whose tics and tacs construct
an almanac, aphonic archive of
the inner life, rusting
with hushed facts, or 

a mother mammoth
and serene, gliding across your path,
so the shadows of her limbs scratch
out upon your face some blood
narrative. (“[I am preparing to write a book]”)

I’m immediately struck by the poems in Los Angeles, California poet and translator Youna Kwak’s second full-length collection, For This and Other Cruelties (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2025), the first of her work I’ve seen, and an apparent follow-up to her debut, sur vie (Fathom Books, 2020). Across four sections of first-person lyrics—“DEATH OF THE MOTHER,” “LIKENESS,” “AS IF” and “SECOND LIFE”—the poems are dense and intense, graceful and substantive. “I am preparing to write a book,” begins the first stanza of the eleven-stanza opening poem, a piece that pushes, swirls and loops in a remarkably dense yet nimble pattern. As the two-page piece ends: “Or lacking all these / to write the book about the death / of the mother you simply need / a mother, who is dead.” The opening poem immediately sets the tone and tenor for the book as a whole, writing out a bursting, bubbling grief of graceful and substative gestures, offering a light touch of lyric through lines thick with emotional heft. “We all know Mother means / I was born from your body but I too / guaranteed your living. // In the mothering reign where / you are always alive,” opens the poem ‘PREULOGY,” “alone and evenly / breathing, a place // of exile where you remain / a figure leaning lazy on a rock, / black spot of ink bored into sand, [.]” Her poems are collaged and purposeful, direct and layered, writing out all the mess and contradictions of mothers, of family, of grief and sentences. Offering a marvellous and subtle fluidity, these poems are delicately crafted with such utter grace and punch. Or, as the second poem of the prose poem quartet “AND/OR” reads:

In the photograph she perches on a large, flat rock, barely lapped by a ripple of waves visible at the right edge of the frame. She appears to be leaning back on the rock for balance, but because she is lithe and long and the rock not very large, a small, bent awkwardness interrupts her pose, so that she appears not as if balancing gracefully on outstretched arms but rather as if pressing down uncomfortably, a palpable sense of cramping discomfort intriduing into the stillness of the seaside photograph of an object on the verge of collapse.

• • •