I’ve always liked the photography of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, His ‘snapshots’ have a direct joy about them. Lartigue took photographs of what he exactly liked, pretty girls, cars, our animal bodies expressed in leaps & dives etc. I’ve always enjoyed the ‘shorthand’ directness of cellphone shots too, the casual recording of immediate visual pleasure. These images are not meant to be appraised, so they are lively, rude, true to their instant & impulse. My poems aim at the lively, rude & true too, the instants adjacent to the grand theme. Something like the untidy spots in Auden’s Icarus poem, where the dogs go on with their doggy life.

 The idea for this project then is to pair informal poems with informal photographs. I asked a photographer, He Yuxiao, to curate a group of shots that would work well with my poems. Then I asked a Zine & Comic artist, Koonsing SOE, to rework the photographs adding the poems and illustrative elements by hand.