New Titles

These new titles have been added to the bibliography since the downloadable pdf publication Embedded: A Bibliography of Photo-Embedded Fiction & Poetry from the 1890s to 2023, released May 1, 2024. They are shown here in chronological order. All of these will eventually be merged into a second edition of Embedded. To see photographs of the actual book covers, go to the respective area of the bibliography as found under the pull-down menu Photo-Embedded Literature at the top of this blog. [A total of 224 new titles have been added as of the last update on July 26, 2026.]

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Sunshine in the Country: A Book of Rural Poetry. London: Richard Griffin and Company, 1861. One of the first poetry anthologies to feature illustrations in photographs, in this case by William Morris Grundy, illustrated with his negatives by the London Stereoscopic Company, which had purchased them posthumously to his death in 1859. The volume includes a variety of poetical works concerning the countryside by numerous authors, including Longfellow, Dodds, Pope, Wordsworth, Cowper, and many others notable poets, and is illustrated with twenty mounted albumen prints.

Anonymous. The Romance of Matrimony: A Tale Founded on Fact.  Philadelphia: Howard Challen 1865. A book-length poem with six tipped-in albumen prints – five reproducing works of art (including the Venus de Milo and Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper) and one a view of Pompeii very likely after Alinari.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Idylls of the King, and Other Poems. Privately published, 1875. The famous book photographically illustrated by Julia Margaret Cameron. This is a rare (and possibly unique) example of a photographer editing a poet’s work to suit her own photographic interpretations of his poetry. Cameron published her own book after the commercial publisher Henry S. King reproduce her photographs as small engravings instead. Cameron’s Idylls included original photographs and only selected excerpts from Tennyson’s text, which, as Michael Nott notes in Photopoetry 1845-2015, [“quotation”]. The size of Cameron’s original edition is unknown, but only a dozen or so copies are known to survive.

Clement Biddle. Poems by Clement Biddle. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Baker, 1876. Biddle’s poems are accompanied by ten albumen photographs, three wood engraved plates, three wood-engraved text illustrations, all apparently unattributed.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Poetical Works Of Henry W Longfellow. London: R & A Suttaby, 1877. Poems by Longfellow with ten full page tipped in photos by Payne Jennings.

Alfred Tennyson. The Works of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate. London: R & A Suttaby, London, 1878. Poems by Tennyson, illustrated throughout with photographic plates by Payne Jennings.

Alfred Tennyson. The Brook. Newcastle upon Tyne: Arthur Brown, 1879. Thirteen beautiful photographs (probably albumen prints) by Arthur Brown are mounted on heavy card with stanzas from Tennyson’s poem printed below. A text indicates the the poet found these photographs “‘a most pleasant illustration of my Poem.”

Lord Byron. The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. London: R & A Suttaby, 1880. Poems by Byron with photographs by Payne Jennings.

William Wordsworth. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, with Photographic Illustrations by Payne Jennings. London: R & A Suttaby, 1884. Poems by Wordsworth with eleven mounted original photographs plus a circular portrait photograph on the title page and two other photographs appended.

Mrs. A. V. Davis. By Woodland and Sea (Hyannis and Vicinity). Lynn, MA: Souvenir Publishing Company, 1895. A compilation of poetry and photographs (reproduced in half-tone) celebrating the Hyannis area. Both poetry and photographs are presumably by Davis.

Joseph R. Grismer. Way Down East: A Romance of New England Life. NY: Ogilvie Publishing Co., ca. 1900. No. 3 in their Play Book Series. Text and photograph taken from sale offering by John Bale Books, June 25, 2025. “A pulp novelization of the American stage melodrama Way Down East, dramatized by Joseph R. Grismer from the original play by Lottie Blair Parker. This tie-in edition was issued during the show’s popular national tour under producer William A. Brady. With expressive illustrations and a cover scene captioned “You’ve Got to Go,” the novel encapsulates the rustic moralizing, sentimentality, and rural-gothic drama that made the play—and later the 1920 D. W. Griffith film—so enduring in American popular culture. Rear wrapper lists 70+ titles in Ogilvie’s Popular Novels Written from Plays series.”

Brownell, Elizabeth. Posters of the Vision Children of Childhood. Chicago: American Plate and Picture Company, 1903. Nineteen black-and-white real photographs by Brownell of children are mounted on brown paper accompanied by excerpts from her verses. They also have translucent overlays, with poetry from Whittier, Hans Christian Andersen, Mother Goose, and others. Scarce. From the sales offering by Walnut Street Paper, April 2025. “A noted Chicago photographer, Brownell was profiled by Ladies’ Home Journal in January 1902, around the time these photographs were taken, and is described as a ‘great success in the rich but hitherto untouched field of the art [of photography] as applied to book illustration’” who ‘with a sympathetic touch fills her studies with much of the poetic pathos which is frequently the attribute of humble lives.’ Brownell is perhaps best-known for the portrait of Jane Addams that appears in Twenty Years at Hull House, as well as her photographs of the children of working-class Chicagoans.”

William Leighton. Florentine Sonnets. Florence: Giulio Gianinni, 1906. Poems and seventeen photogravure reproductions of photographs of Florence.

William Leighton. Roman Sonnets. Florence: Giulio Gianinni, 1908. Poems and photogravure reproductions of photographs of Rome by commercial photographers.

Edwin Arnold. The Light of Asia or the Great Renunciation; Being the Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India, As Founder of Buddhism (As Told in Verse by an Indian Buddhist). London: Keagan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1908. With thirty-two photographs by Mabel Eardley-Wilmot.

Effie Waller. Rhymes from the Cumberland. NY: Broadway Publishing Co., 1909. Poems proclaiming her love for the Cumberland area of Kentucky by the African American poet, with seven unattributed photographs, all of which are landscape views of the region except for a full-length portrait of Waller.

Paul Laurence Dunbar. Speakin’ O’ Christmas. Dodd Mead, 1914. Poems by Dunbar with 12 b&w photographs of winter scenes and African American subjects

Kendall Banning. Bypaths in Arcady; A Book of Love Songs. Chicago: Brothers of the Book, 1915. Poems by Banning, with twenty-five photogravures—”dramatically staged tableaux” by Lejaren a Hiller, considered “the creator of American photographic illustration.” The edition consisted of seventy-seven numbered copies on Japanese vellum and five-hundred and forty numbered copies on Fabriano hand-made paper.

George Sterling. Evanescent City. Corning, CA: Transmutation Publishing, 1915. Sterling’s poem about the city of San Francisco is accompanied by nine reproductions of photographs by Francis Bruguiere.

George Sterling. Yosemite: An Ode. San Francisco: A.M. Robertson, 1916. In 1915, Sterling wrote a long poem about Yosemite National Park and sold it to one of San Francisco’s newspapers. The following year it was published as a book with five photographs by W.E. Dassonville.

William Herschell. The Kid Has Gone to the Colors and Other Verse. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1917. Herschell was a journalist and writer for the The Indianapolis News. According to one bookseller, a few of his mid-western and patriotic poems are written with various vernacular accents. Illustrated by more than thirty photographs by Paul Shideler, a photographer for the same newspaper.

Vladimir Mayakovsky and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Pro eto. Ei i mne. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo (State Publishing House), 1923. Mayakovsky’s love poem to Lily Brik, whose portrait is on the cover, includes nine illustrations by Rodchenko (including the cover image). The title can be roughly translated as About This. To Her and to Me.

Yan Larri. Neobyknovennye Prikliucheniia Karika I Vali [The Extraordinary Adventures of Karik and Valya]. 1937. A very rare “subversive fantasy children’s book,” featuring surrealist photomontages by S. Petrovich of children interacting with insects after turning smaller than ant size. Offered for sale by the booksellers Type Punch Matrix in 2025.

W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. Letters from Iceland. London: Faber & Faber, 1937. While essentially a travel journal, much of Auden’s share of the book is written in poetry and he contributed many snapshots of Iceland.

Helen Burwell Chapin. Echoes. Gillick Press, 1938.

Archibald MacLeish. Land of the Free. NY: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938. A book-length poem by MacLeish, with eighty-eight photographs by various FSA photographers.

Roland Penrose. The Road Is Wider than Long. London Gallery Editions, 1939. Penrose’s Surrealist paean to Lee Miller in the form of poems and photographs. The book was inspired by a trip the couple took throughout the Balkans by sea and automobile in 1938. Designed by Hans Bellmer.

Anne Brigman. Songs of a Pagan. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1949. A collection of b&W images and poems by Anne Brigman, a well-known pictorialist photographer.

Elly Jannes & Anna Riwkin-Brick. Elle Kari. Hamburg: Friedrich Oetinger, 1951. The first of fifteen photobooks for children in the series Children’s Everywhere. Elle Kari a fictionalized story written by Jannes that follows the everyday life of a Sami child in the Lapland area of Sweden, with photographs by Riwkin-Brick. Each of the titles was originally released in Swedish, then translated into as many as eighteen additional languages. Other authors includes Astrid Lindgren, Eugénie Söderberg, Vera Forsberg, and Cordelia Edvardson. Anna Riwkin-Brick was apparently the sole photographer for the series. The final title was published in 1970.

Mason Jordan. The Blue-Green Whale. Taos: Motive Press, 1952. The last of a series of three chapbooks which includes all of Mason’s extant earlier poetry not included in NOTEBOOK #23. Poems and pasted-in found images from magazines. Almost all signs point to Jordan actually being the poet/publisher/bookseller Judson Crews, and not a young African-American poet, as was often thought.

Bertold Brecht. Kriegsfibel. Berlin: Edité par Eulenspiegel, 1955. This book of poems and images represents Brecht’s reaction to World War II and its immediate predecessor, the Spanish Civil War. While in exile in Finland, Sweden, and the US, Brecht created these “photo-epigrams” by clipping photographs and articles from newspapers and magazines (including Life) and writing brief four-line poems that relate to the images. Although partly anti-war, Brecht’s poems mostly direct their vitriol toward the politicians, generals, and national leaders—or, in his term “misleaders”—who sent their young men off to murder each other and kill or maim millions of innocent civilians. This original edition had only seventy photographs and poems. It was translated into English with additional photographs in 1998.

Mason Jordan Mason. The Yardarm of Murphy’s Kite. Ranches of Taos: Motive Press, 1956.
Photographs cut from magazines on both sides of covers, with title and author name letterpress printed in blue on front. Additional magazine images throughout. The images appear to come from nudist, girly, travel, and other magazines. Each copy presumably is unique. It has been suggested that Mason Jordan Mason is a pseudonym for Judson Crews who admittedly used several pseudonyms and published very similar books under his own name.new

Ed van der Elsken. Een Liefdesgeschiedenis in Saint-Germain-Des-Prés. Amsterdam De Bezige Bij, 1956. A visual record of life on Paris’ left bank with a fictional narrative. One of the most important titles of its era. Published in English in 1958 as Love on the Left Bank.

Dare Wright. The Lonely Doll. NY: Doubleday, 1957. Dare’s first book about Edith and the Bears.

Dare Wright. Holiday for Edith and the Bears. NY: Doubleday, 1958. A sequel to The Lonely Doll (1957), photographed on Okracoke Island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Dore Ashton, ed. Poets and the Past: An Anthology of Poems, and Objects of Art of the Pre-Columbian Past. New York: Andre Emmerich Gallery, 1959. An anthology of poems written in response to sculpture from the pre-Columbian Americas and paired with photographs by Lee Boltin.

Tanaquil Le Clerecq, photography by Martha Swope. Mourka: The Autobiography of a Cat. Stein & Day, 1964. The subject of this faux autobiography is George Balanchine’s pet. It’s a children’s book for adults, illustrated with photographs of cats in motion by a great photographer of dancers, Martha Swope. The author was the fourth Mrs. Balanchine, a dancer who was paralyzed by polio at 27.

“before your very eyes!” London: Goliard Press, 1967. An 8-page stapled one-shot magazine with work by Charles Olson, Aram Saroyan, Anselm Hollo, Tom Raworth, Ron Padgett, James Koller, and Jack Hirschman. Illustrated throughout with photographs reproduced from Verifax photographs by William Jahrmarkt.

Joe Dunn. The Better Dream House. San Francisco: White Rabbit Press, 1968. Poems by Dunn with ten photocollages by Jess.

Allen Ginsberg. Ankor Wat. London: Fulcrum Press, 1968. Ginsberg’s poetry is combined with photographs by Alexandra Lawrence.

William S. Burroughs. The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. London: Cape Goliard Press, 1970. A fantasy movie script based on the shooting of mobster Dutch Schultz. With thirty-five historical photographs.

Alta. Burn this and Memorize Yourself: Poems for Women. NY: Times Change Press (1971). Poems illustrated with photographs by Ellen Shumsky.

Drummond Hadley. Strands of Rawhide. Santa Fe: Goliard, 1972. Poems by the one-time cowboy, with photographs by Diane Hadley.

Marilyn Ducati & Sidney Hecker. Reflections: Joys of Life. derbibooks, 1974. Poems by Ducati and Photographs by Hecker.

John Sterling Harris. Barbed Wire. Brigham Young University Press, 1974. Poems about the West and living in the West, with photographs by L. Douglas Hill.

Julius Lester & David Gahr. Who I Am. Dial Press, 1974. “A pictorial and poetic celebration of everyday life and the human experience.” Lester taught at the University of Massachusetts for many years. Gahr became one of the most famous photographers of folk & jazz musicians of the second half of the twentieth century.

Jerome Rothenberg. Esther K. Comes to America 1931. Greensboro: Unicorn Press, 1974. A verse play with a cast that includes the writer Kathy Acker. Includes five photographs by Larry Fink.

Jim Heynen. Notes from Custer. Ann Arbor: Bear Claw Press, 1976. From the author’s website: “This small collection includes my own poems and several translations of Lakota songs.” With photographs of topographical maps and of people from the Lakota Tribe from the personal collection of Richard A. Pohrt.

John Logan and Aaron Siskind. Poems and Photographs. Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop, 1976. Poems by Logan and photographs by Siskind.

Sharon Doubiago. Hymn to the Cosmic Clothesline: A Mendocino Love Poem. Albion: Modern Prometheus, 1978. A poem by Doubiago, with photographs by M.E. Abell, Efrain Correal, and Sierra.

Zindzi Mandela and Peter Magubane. black as i am. Los Angeles: The Guild of Tutors Press, 1978. Life in South Africa’s shanty-towns, as told through poetry by the daughter of Winnie and Nelson Mandela and a highly respected South African photographer.

Ed Ruscha and Lawrence Weiner. Hard Light. Los Angeles: Heavy Industries Publications, 1978. Except for one statement by Lawrence Weiner, this is a completely textless photo-narrative documenting several conversations between three women, Shelley Chamberlain, Suzanne Chandler and Susan Haller. While technically this is an artists’ book, the fact that it is a photo-novella about a textless conversation made me want to include this. Weiner’s text says: ‘IN THE YEAR 2000 ALL RACECAR DRIVING WILL BE TAKEN OVER BY WOMEN.”

Ted Hughes and Fay Godwin. Remains of Elmet. NY: Harper & Row, 1979. Poems and photographs about Elmet, an area in West Yorkshire, the place of Ted Hughes birth.

Robert Lax. Circus Zirkus Cirque Circo. Zurich: Pendo Verlag, 1981. A poem “Circus of the Sun”, with parallel translation into German by Alfred Kuoni, French by Catherine Mauger, and Spanish (fragments) by Ernesto Cardenal, plus photographs by Bernhard Moosbrugger.

Peter Lyssiotis. Journey of a Wise Electron and Other Stories. Prahran, Victoria, Australia: Champion Books, 1981. Photographs, photomontage and three short stories, all by Lyssiotis. Limited to 1,000 copies.

Mark Melnicove, ed. Poets on Photography. Hulls Cove: Dog Ear Press, 1981. Edited and designed by Melnicove. Poems, often paired with photographs, by Charles Reznikoff, Yoko Ono, Colette Inez, Adrienne Rich, Charles Simic, James Wright, Tess Gallagher, Gerard Malanga, Lewis Carroll, Dennis Cooper, Piero Heliczer, and many others.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Invisible Threads. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1981. Poems and photographs in b&w and color by Yevtushenko. Translated from the Russian by Paul Falla and Natasha Ward.

George Mackay Brown and Gunnie Moberg. Stone. Perthshire: Kulgin D. Duval and Colin H. Hamilton, 1982. Poems by Brown and close-up color photographs of rocks by Moberg, both then residents of Orkney. A stunningly beautiful limited edition of 125 copies printed at the fabled Officina Bodoni in Verona.

Don Novello. The Blade: Shellville High School Yearbook. Collier Books, 1984. Novello, better known as Father Guido Guido on Saturday Night Live, created this faux yearbook in which every image of a student is an image of a sheep. The deadpan captions quietly mock a traditional yearbook in every respect, including local advertisements. Since my bibliography already includes several mock biographies, a mock catalogue raisonné for an artist, and a mock auction catalog meant to serve as a biography of a marriage and a divorce, I thought it deserves a high school yearbook as well.

Thomas Ligotti. Songs of a Dead Dreamer. Albuquerque: Silver Scarab Press, 1985. Over time, Ligotti’s supernatural horror stories have become highly celebrated. This edition was a small release of only 300 copies and is now exceedingly rare. It included numerous full page b/w photocollage illustrations by Harry O. Morris (who also did the cover image). It has been reprinted several times in expanded and “definitive” editions, but none apparently include the photographs.

Chris Peditto and Roea Wallace. Dreams for Flesh. Philadelphia: Dauphine Press, 1985. A scarce book of prose and photos celebrating Fat Tuesday, “the final day of bacchanalia before the Lenten fasting begins,” in New Orleans. A short story by Peditto about a drunken day in New Orleans followed by a series of black-and-white photographs by Roea Wallace. Many of her photos show people in masks or costumes. Each photo is accompanied by a short text by Peditto on the opposite page.

Stephen King & Barbara Kruger. My Pretty Pony. NY: Knopf, 1988. A short story by King with original photographs by Kruger. Originally published in a metal slip-cased limited edition by The Whitney Museum of American Art in the same year. From the Artists and Writers series of the Whitney.

Mphela Makgoba & Kathy Walden Kaplan. How Long? Poems of Struggle. Reston, VA: Librado Press, 1988. From the catalog of the bookseller Capitol Hill Books: “The South African poet, actor, and activist Mphela Makgoba left his country for the United States as part of a theater company in 1964 and refused to return, spending decades in the United States writing and speaking out against the horrors of apartheid. “Soweto” here stands for “Sons of Women Enslaved, Terrorized, Offended” acting as both refrain and a call to action for African warriors to join the struggle. Makgoba braids together the situation in his home country with the Civil Rights struggle in the U.S., invoking Malcolm X, Winnie and Nelson Mandela, and Angela Davis as allies in the struggle and stressing its urgency: “the racists aren’t going to stop killing…”

Jacques Roubaud. Some Thing Black. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990. Poems in which Roubaud tries to come to terms with the death of his wife, Alix. A series of her b&w photographs called If Something Black is appended at the end of the book.

Seamus Heaney and Rachel Giese. Sweeney’s Flight. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Heaney re-worked his poem of ten years previously, “Sweeney Astray,” based on the Irish folk tale, “Sweeney’s Frenzy,” about an Irish king driven mad by a curse laid upon him. Here, the photographer Rachel Giese has matched her b&w photographs taken around Northern Ireland to the revised text by Heaney.

Cecilia Vicuña. Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water. Graywolf, 1992. Poetry and photography by Chilean/Andean poet Vicuña. Many of the photographs reflect her own artworks, which are composed outdoors primarily of natural materials and often include thread or other elements that she has added. The poems have been drawn from three different books of her poetry. Precarious, Palabrarmás, and La Wik’un. A few of the poems were originally written in English, but those in Spanish were translated by Eliot Weinberger and Suzanne Jill Levine.

Kathleen Jamie and Sean Mayne Smith. The Autonomous Region: Poems and Photographs from Tibet. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1993. In 1989, poet Kathleen Jamie and photographer Sean Mayne Smith spent several months on the road and in the company of nomads, pilgrims, monks and traders in Tibet.

Iain Sinclair. Downriver. NY: Random House, 1993. Sinclair’s second novel, about the Thames River, contains a dozen reproductions of postcard photographs of colonial Africa by Joblard which lead off each chapter. These apparently did not appear in the earlier British first edition.

John Yau & Bill Barrette. Berlin Diptychon. Timken, 1995. Poems by Yau and b&w photographs by Barrette.

George Mackay Brown and Gunnie Moberg. Orkney Pictures & Poems. Grantown-on-Spey: Colin Baxter Photography Ltd, 1996. Moberg’s photographic response to Brown’s poems about Orkney, where they both lived at that time. Moberg’s images were reportedly inspired by the Sierra Club publication Not Man Apart (1965), which featured the poetry of Robinson Jeffers and the photographs of numerous West Coast American photographers.

Paul Muldoon. Kerry Slides. Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1996. Poems by Muldoon with photographs by Bill Doyle.

Jorie Graham and Jeanette Montgomery Barron. Photographs & Poems. Zurich: Scalo Verlag, 1997. Poetry by Graham and photographs by Barron.

Max Blagg & Ralph Gibson. Pink Instrument. Brookline Books, 1998. Poems by Blagg and photographs by Gibson.

Harmony Korine. A Crack-Up at the Race Riots. NY: Doubleday, 1998. According the the Amazon description of the 2013 reprint from the publisher Drag City: “This debut novel from an underground filmmaker uses print, photographs, drawings, news clippings, handwriting, a poem, attempted diagrams, and clip art to enhance the text, which primarily tells of a race war that happens in Florida, where the Jewish people sit in trees, the black people are run by MC Hammer, and the white people are run by Vanilla Ice. Or as the author himself described it front of a national television audience, “I wanted to write the Great American Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Novel.” In actuality, it is a collection of hard-luck stories, off-and-on-color jokes, script scraps, found letters, free rhymes, drug flashbacks, and other missing scenes, all exploring the world of show business with fingers prying in the cracks and feet set lightly in the black humors of the real world.”

Valerie Gillies. Men and Beasts : Wild Men and Tame Animals of Scotland. Edinburgh: Luath Press Limited, 2000. A collaboration between the poet Valerie Gillies and the photographer Rebecca Marr which combines prose, poems, stories, and photographs to depict wild men and domestic animals in their own settings.

Lewis Warsh and Julie Harrison. Debtor’s Prison. Granary Books & Visual Studies Workshop Press, 2001. “Debtor’s Prison is the first collaboration between poet/novelist Lewis Warsh and video/visual artist Julie Harrison, in which 62 skewed and closely-cropped black & white video stills from Harrison’s primitive-style documentary and performance tapes of the 1970s are paired with stark lines of text written in response by Warsh. Debtor’s Prison combines the intelligences and sensibilities of two compelling artists, Lewis Warsh and Julie Harrison, and through their ways of seeing and observing, investigates the strange call and response between forms. The ambiguities of meaning, life’s pleasures and anguish, find a beautiful and disturbing home here.” wrote Lynn Tillmann.

Susan Howe. Kidnapped. Coracle, 2002. Limited edition of 300 copies. Howe’s slant meditation on 19th century books, Robert Louis Stevenson, her mother, Ireland, acting, Dracula, and assorted other subjects, all packaged in a beautiful small edition from Simon Cutts’ Coracle Press. There is also a longish untitled poem at the end of the book. With photographs by the author and her then-husband Peter Hare (several of which are tipped-in) and an actual Irish postage stamp.

Lisa Asagi & Gaye Chan. Physics. Tinfish Press, 2003. Lisa Asagi and Gaye Chan have been joining forces for 3 years. All of their collaborative efforts have dealt with travel and home in some way–part documentary, part travelogue, part scrapbook, and part personal essay. Physics is a short prose poem by Asagi, with reproductions of nine photographs by Chan. The book takes the form of a foldout map.

Rinko Kawauchi. The Eyes, The Ears. Foil, 2005. A collection of photographs of everyday situations juxtaposed with short whispery poetical texts, both by the Japanese photographer.

Janet Sternburg. Optic Nerve. Red Hen Press, 2005. Photopoems by Sternburg. Poems with color photographs (also by the poet) embedded within each poem.

Marsha Swan. Dirty Sky. Hag’s Head Press, 2005. A novel about children growing up in a Midwestern American slaughterhouse town. With photographs. [No photo has been found.]

Ian McMillan. Ideas Have Legs. Fuel, 2006. Photographs by Andy Martin. From the publisher’s ebsite: “This beautifully produced book is the result of two artists collaborating WORDS versus PICTURES. Ian McMillan, writer and broadcaster and Andy Martin, seasoned imagemaker, poetry and prose from one – visually interpreted by the other. The result is a lavish volume of ideas, oceans of notions. . . Images have been created using digital illustration, painting, photography and found imagery ingeniously edited into a consistent whole. . . With a foreword by BBC Radio’s Mark Radcliffe.”

Ricardo Lira Acuña. Under the Influence. ‎ Pichín Publishing, 2007. Poetry in English and Spanish by an Arizona-born poet, with his own photographs.

Claude Cahun (pseudonym of Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob). Disavowals. London: Tate, 2007. Cahun’s writing includes multiple forms and contains a number of photomontages, which were created in collaboration with her partner Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Malherbe). Susan de Muth has delivered the first English translation of this extremely rare 1930 book, originally titled Aveux non Avenus (Paris: Édition due Carrefour).

Séguier and Plessis [pseudonyms for David Edward & Jay Cantor]. Niche: A Novel, with Brief Manifesto of Le Laboratoire. Idea Translation Lab, Harvard University Press, 2007. According to the rear cover text: “Niche tells the story of an artist who meets a scientist and through the encounter makes a hypothesis: If the artist became a stem cell and then divided into a neuron, would he discover the meaning of intelligence? David Edwards and Jay Cantor introduce a new fiction genre – the novel catalogue – to coincide with the opening of the new art and design innovation center in Paris, Le Laboratoire. In the novel catalogue, the /process/ through which creators create matters as much as the /works/ that result from the creation. Illustrated by the photography of New York artist Daniel Faust, the novel catalogue fictionalizes the creative process of an exhibition season which opens with the artistic outcome of an experiment between Fabrice Hyber, a French artist, and Robert Langer of MIT.”

Fanny Howe. In & Out. Studio7Arts, 2009. Howe’s poetic responses to Robert Gardener’s Polaroid photographs. An edition of 250, plus 50 hors commerce.

Paul Muldoon and Norman McBeath. Plan B. Enitharmon Press, 2009. A planned collaboration between the poet Muldoon and photographer McBeath.

Clark Coolidge. The Act of Providence. Cumberland: Combo Books, 2010. Seventy-six numbered poems by Clark Coolidge, plus about a dozen black-and-white photographs (including the cover shots) by Celia Coolidge.

John Fuller and David Hurn. Writing the Picture. Seren, 2010. A collaboration between Fuller, a poet, and Hurn, a photographer. Includes a discussion between the two about the differences and similarities between the two art forms.

Marvin Bell & Nathan Lyons. Whiteout. Lodima Press, 2011. Poetry by Bell & photographs by Lyons, founder & longtime Director of the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester.

Rachel DuPlessis. The Collage Poems of Drafts. Salt Publishing, 2011. According to the description on Amazon, these are “two sequenced works for reading and looking that move back and forth across the porous border between language and image.” The few examples I have seen show poems and images embedded within one another, and the images include photographic ones.

Norman McBeath and Robert Crawford. Simonides. Easel Press, 2011. Texts by Robert Crawford and b&w photographs by Norman McBeath. The book also contains Robert Crawford’s essay “Simonides and the War on Terror.”

Joshua Beckman and Jon Beacham. Porch Light (lamp and chair). Holyoke, MA: The Brother In Elysium, 2012. A book of twenty-seven poems by Beckman and eight photocollages by Beacham. Letterpress edition of 300 copies.

Ian McMillan. The Days Out The Weeks Away. Incline Press, 2012. Poems by Ian McMillan with photographs by Ian Beesley which ar tipped on to pages. An edition of 500 with 150 hardcover copies.

Duane Michals. A Pittsburgh Poem. Pittsburgh: High Street House Books, 2012. A 21-section poem with Pittsburgh as its theme by Michals, who is primarily known as a photographer, with two of his color photographs tipped-in: “The Star of Pittsburgh” 1984 and “I Remember Pittsburgh” 1982.new

Tamar Yoseloff & Vici MacDonald. Formerly. Hercules Editions, 2012. Formerly commemorates the forgotten corners of a London fast disappearing. The book is a sequence of fourteen irregular and anarchic sonnets, each written in response to a bleakly humorous image of superannuated London. The final sonnet, which like the book is entitled “Formerly,” revisits lines from each of the previous thirteen poems.

Jordan Abel. The Place of Scraps. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2013. Much of this book is poetry created by extracting words from the writings of Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer, whose work on various First Nations both helped to preserve aspects of their culture and destroy it. Abel belongs to Canada’s Nisga’a Nation. Abel’s text is laid out spatially, suggesting the presence of Barbeau’s unseen text. Some of Barbeau’s photographs are also included.

Warren Lehrer. A Life in Books. Novato, CA: Goof Books, 2013. This is something of an artist’s book, but it is also a substantial novel. According to the publisher, A Life In Books is an illuminated novel containing 101 books within it, all written by Lehrer’s protagonist, author Bleu Mobley, who finds himself in prison looking back on his life and career. Mobley’s autobiography/apologia is paired with a review of all 101 of his books. Each book is represented by its first-edition cover design and catalogue copy, and more than a third of his books are excerpted. The resulting retrospective contrasts the published writings (which read like short stories) with the author’s confessional memoir, forming a most unusual portrait of a well-intentioned, obsessively inventive (but ethically challenged) visionary.” Some of the book covers use photographs. There may be additional photographs that I have not seen.

Iain S. Thomas. I Wrote This for You. Central Avenue Publishing, 2013. Nearly 200 poems on “life, love, loss, beginnings and endings” by a South African multi-media artist, with photographs by Jon Ellis. Republished in 2018 by Andrews McMeel Publishing (Kansas City).

Iain S. Thomas. I Wrote This for You: Just the Words. Central Avenue Publishing, 2013. A greatly enlarged edition of I Wrote This for You, published in the same year. There are now 400 poems on “life, love, loss, beginnings and endings” by a South African multi-media artist in the volume, and, despite the title, there are still at least a few photographs by Jon Ellis. Republished in 2018 by Andrews McMeel Publishing (Kansas City).

Caroline Bergvall. Drift. Nightboat Books, 2014. From the publisher’s website: “Drift retraces the language and maritime imagination of early medieval North Atlantic travels from the sagas to quest poems to today’s sea migrancies. Its centerpiece is the song cycle, “Drift,” which takes the anonymous 10th century Anglo-Saxon quest poem The Seafarer as its inspiration. Both ancient and contemporary tales of travel and exile shadow the plight and losses of wanderers across the waters in this haunting new book. Drift is the second of Bergvall’s explorations of historical English language. The text sequences combine with drawings, maps, macro-photos to track these depths.”

Harry Karlinksy. The Stonehenge Letters. Coach House Books, 2014. From Amazon: “While researching why Freud failed to win a Nobel Prize at the Nobel Archives in Sweden, a psychiatrist makes an unusual discovery. Among the piles of papers in the ‘Crackpot’ file are letters addressed to the executor of Alfred Nobel’s will, written by several notable Nobel laureates — including Rudyard Kipling and Marie Curie — each offering an explanation of why and how Stonehenge was constructed. Diligent research uncovers that Alfred Nobel added a secret codicil to his will, a prize for the Nobel laureate who solves the mystery of Stonehenge. Includes such things as— photos, letters and documents.

Rachel DuPlessis. Graphic Novella. ‎ Xexoxial Editions, 2015. DuPlessis has described her “trash book” as follows: “Formally, the work has a page of quasi-collages with poems (a scrapbook mode is alluded to) along with a facing-page gloss of that page. The recto is the “visual/collage poem” page, the verso is the gloss.” The collages include photographic elements.(https://www.hws.edu/offices/senecareview/beyond-category/from-graphic-novella.aspx)

Eliza Griswold. I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan. Hill & Wang, 2015. The poet Eliza Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy went to Afghanistan to collect landays, an ancient oral and anonymous form created and often sung by Pashtun women. Translations by Griswold. The poet Carol Muske-Dukes said “This is poetry of a rural tradition that is as world-wise, war-wise and uniquely sophisticated as any collection of writing by women, anywhere.”

Sergio Marras. Fotopoemas: (sobre textos de Nicanor Parra). Ornitorrinco, 2015. From Amazon: “Fotopoemas is a book of photographs by set in tension with verses by the poet Nicanor Parra. Marras [the photographer] and Parra worked together for a year and the poet allowed the use of single verses from his great creations and even, in the heat of the process, contributed two unpublished verses. . . The risks were considerable, for it was not a question of illustrating poetry, as legitimate works by other photographers have done. Nor was it to fix a meaning to his visual fragments. Rather, it was a matter of fusing two natures to knowingly provoke unpredictable results.” Translated with DeepL.com (free version).

Peter Santino. Shasta: A Photo-Novella. NY: Failure Institute, 2015. From Amazon: “Guided by failure and hopelessness, a ragtag team of mountaineers sets out on a adventure that transcends the normal bounds of storytelling. They seek nothing less than the summit of the sacred mountain that provides a physical path between Earth and Heaven. Mount Shasta, A Photo-Novella, is a story told not only with words, but with photographs. In the late 1990’s, contemporary artist Peter Santino, set out to make to a movie inspired by a beloved book. With the help of a group of willing friends, a real mountain and a very limited budget of $120, this work was published in 2001 as a streaming Macromedia Flash project. Now, some 15 years later, Mount Shasta returns in a form truer to the photo-novella.

Iain S. Thomas. I Wrote This for You: 2007-2017. Central Avenue Publishing, 2015. The third in a series of books by a South African multi-media artist. 315 pages of poems accompanied by photographs by Jon Ellis. On one of the final pages, Thomas claims that more than a million people had read these poems to date (they were originally written for his blog iwrotethisforyou.me). The first two books were both originally published in 2013, the fourth in 2017. All four were republished in 2018 by Andrews McMeel Publishing (Kansas City).

Erica Baum. Dog Ear. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016. From the publisher’s website: “The concept of Dog Ear is simple and straightforward: dog-eared pages of mass-market paperbacks are photographed to isolate the small diagonally bisected squares or rectangles of text. The photographs are formally quite neutral and sedate—cursorily reminiscent of Alber’s ‘Homage to the Square’ series of prints, paintings and tapestries—but the text also demands attention and it is what allows or coaxes the viewer to linger. In his introduction to the book, Kenneth Goldsmith asks: ‘Do we see them or do we read them? If we choose to read them, how should we read? Across the fold? Through it? Around it? If we choose to look at Baum’s pictures, how should we see them? As artistic photographs? Documentation? Text art?'”

Clara Beaudoux. Madeleine Project. Éditions Sous-Sol, 2016. In French. A old woman who died had stored all her life in a cellar: notebooks, photos, souvenirs, jewelry, letters, old newspapers. Beaudoux discovered the material and over the course of several days created a portrait of the woman tweet by tweet on Twitter using the hashtag #MadeleineProject. Now she has turned it into a book, with many photographs. A reader calls it an example of “creative reportage,” because of the element of fiction injected into Madeleine’s life by Beaudoux.

Robert Crawford and Norman McBeath. Chinese Makars. Easel Press, 2016. Chinese Makars contains Scots versions of work by several poets or ‘makars’ from the classic era of Chinese poetry. The Scots version of the poems by Robert Crawford are paired with b&w photographs by the pioneering Victorian photographer John Thomson and the contemporary photographer Norman McBeath.

Louis Dienes. Black & White: A Poem with Photographs. Gangemi Editore 2016. According to the publisher’s website: “The poem ‘Black & White’ was written on the occasion of a 1957 group exhibition at the Terrain Gallery in New York City, at which many of the photographs in this book were first shown.”

Harry Karlinksy. The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (1857-1879). The Friday Project, 2016. A fictional biography of a supposed son of Charles Darwin, with photographs, letters, and other illustration.

Wayne Koestenbaum. Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations. Brooklyn: Cabinet, 2016. From 2010 to 2015, Koestenbaum wrote a column for Cabinet Magazine in which he responded to anonymous “found” photographs that its editor would mail to him. The results are wildly imaginative essay-fictions that know no boundaries. “I want my fantasies to coalesce into an architectural folly, like a gazebo or a rotunda.” Both fun and thought-provoking.

Ian McMillan. Yorkshire Stridings. Souvenir Press, 2016. Poetry by McMillan and photographs by Ian Beesley. “An incisive, intelligent guide to the history and landscape of Yorkshire from a renowned social documentary photographer and one of Britain’s most popular poets,” according to the University of Central Lancashire.

Paisley Rekdal. Imaginary Vessels. Copper Canyon Press, 2016. Included in this book of Rekdal’s poetry is “Shooting the Skulls: A Wartime Devotional,” a sequence of sonnets in ekphrastic conversation with Andrea Modica’s portraits of skulls unearthed from the Colorado Mental Health Institute, according to the publisher’s website. That poem is over thirty pages long, about half of which are taken up with photographs.

Nathaniel Tarn and Joan Myers. The Persephones. Bologna: Damiani, 2016. From the publisher’s website: “In The Persephones, internationally known poet Nathaniel Tarn and photographer Joan Myers have collaborated on an elegant retelling of the myth of Persephone’s abduction by Hades into the Underworld. First published in 1974, and again in 2009 in a limited collector’s edition (both of which are out of print), Tarn’s poems have attracted a devoted readership. This beautifully designed and produced edition pairs the poems with Myers’s stunning photographs, many of which were shot at the sites from which the myth originated.”

Gabriele Tinti & Andres Serrano. Last Words. Skira, 2016. A collection of found poems comprised of the last words of ordinary people who chose to commit suicide turned into a single, long poem. This is matched with pictures of people who died by suicide from Serrano’s series “The Morgue.”

Ching-In Chen. Recombinant. Kelsey Street Press, 2017. Froom the publisher’s website: “This text urges the reader to investigate female and genderqueer lineages in the context of labor smuggling and trafficking. . . via photographs; newspaper articles; maps; city directories; records of immigration, birth, and death; as well as scholarly research and archaeological records.”

Iain S. Thomas. I Wrote This for You and For You Only. Central Avenue Publishing, 2017. The fourth in a series of books by a South African multi-media artist, with photographs by Jon Ellis. The first two were both originally published in 2013. Republished in 2018 by Andrews McMeel Publishing (Kansas City).

John Copenhaver. Dodging and Burning. Pegasus Crime, 2018. A photograph of a murdered woman is sent anonymously to a mystery writer, an event which takes her back fifty-five years earlier when she was a young girl. A local woman had gone missing and one of her friends had claimed he discovered and photographed her body in the woods before it disappeared. Copenhaver’s mystery contains a photograph showing a dead woman sprawled in the woods.

Asiya Wadud. Crosslight for Youngbird. NY: Nightboat Books, 2018. Wadud’s first book of poetry aches for the fragility of life, which brings forth immense sadness, but permits such joy. The poems and prose poems are of people swimming and refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, the transient beauty of light and water, the stillbirth of a child, the migration of birds and people. Her use of language is stunningly rich, fertile, and stimulating. With several b&w photographs of beaches and ocean waves by the author.

Laura Beatty. Lost Property. London: Atlantic Books, 2019. Comments from Amazon about this novel: “In an attempt to understand her country and her species, [a writer] and her lover rent a busted-out van and journey through France and down to the Mediterranean, across Italy and the Balkans, finishing in Greece and its islands. Along the way, they drive through the Norman Conquest, the Hundred Years War, the Italian Renaissance, the 1990s and on to the current refugee crisis, encountering the shades of history, sometimes figuratively and sometimes – such as Joan of Arc, sitting pertly in the back of the van – quite literally.” It contains sixteen images, less than half of them photos. Only 6 of the images are credited, many of them noted as having been modified by cropping or other methods.

Billy-Ray Belcourt. NDN Coping Mechanisms. CBC Books, 2019.  Belcourt’s book of poetry contains an unknown number of photographs.

Elizabeth Bradford. Toward Antarctica. Boreal Books, 2019. According to the publisher, this book “documents and queries her work as a guide on ships in Antarctica.” Bradford “uses photographs, compressed prose, and short poems to examine our relationship to remoteness, discovery, expertise, awe, labor, temporary societies, “pure” landscapes, and tourism’s service economy.”

Vesna Main. Only a Lodger . . . And Hardly That: A Fictional Autobiography. Seagull Books, 2019. A novel in five parts, which tells the story of Main’s maternal and paternal grandparents. In the section called “The Poet,” a series of family photographs is used as part of the text.

Peter Rock. The Night Swimmers. Soho, 2019. The narrator of Rock’s apparently autobiographical novel focuses on a period in his twenties when he was living in Door County, Wisconsin. A regular night swimmer in Green Bay, he encounters another night swimmer, a mysterious woman twice his age, who comes to play a strange role in his personal mythology as he matures as a writer and a person. The novel includes several b&w reproductions of paintings by Charles Burchfield, a map, and several photographs (mostly uncredited).

Claro. La maison indigène. Actes Sud, 2020. The author Claro revisits the “indigenous house” his grandfather built in 1930 in Neo-Moorish style, learning that Albert Camus, Le Corbusier, and other important figures had visited his grandfather and, later, his father there. A work of autofiction, reproducing numerous photographs from the family archive, newspaper clippings, vintage ads, postcards, etc.

Tyree Daye. Cardinal. Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2020. Poems about people, the South, Youngsville NC, and the Green Book, with six color photographs of people, presumably by the author, plus a cover photograph of a sculpture by Alison Saar.

M. Kitchell. Prelude to Transgression. Lawrence: Inside the Castle, 2020. According to Asterism, the book’s distributor, the texts in Prelude “attempt to both dramatize the impossible and touch upon the sovereignty found in poetic effusion simultaneously.” It includes “some photographs.”

Lauren Russell. Descent. Grafton, VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020. From the publisher’s website: “In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet’s great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary’s omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present.” The book contains several photographs and several photographs of documents , newspapers, etc.

Orion Shawnte & Jia Oak Baker. Gravity & Spectacle. Tolsun Books, 2020. According to the publisher, this is “a slanted ode to Phoenix and its surrounding deserts, both gorgeous and absurd, stoic and wry, gravitational and spectacular, a ‘love letter to the fireplace’ of a hometown seen through the lens and the pens of two of its inhabitants.”

S*an D. Henry-Smith. Wild Peach. NY: Futurepoem Books, 2020. From the publisher’s website: “a multisensory roaming of landscape and interior, often (but not always) in near stillness and varying light. The power to disrupt and obscure language is an essential tool in protecting this multimodal endeavor; in this project, poetry and photography warm the taste of memory, exploring nonlinear, non-narrative time through the sonic offerings of image and text—and the Outdoors, the interpersonal, and all offered onto. Black Secrecy demands and provides a spirit of collaboration, study, and play. Rest without guilt. Two steppin’ in the parking lot. Screaming into the night sky. In the garden and the noise, what must be learned from the garble? We listen. The ocean is always just over your shoulder.” Poetry and photographs by Henry-Smith.

Gabriele Tinti & Roger Ballen. The Earth Will Come To Laugh And Feast. Powerhouse, 2020. According to the publisher, this is “a poetic journey through a carefully curated selection of internationally revered artist,Roger Ballen’s photographs. . . Tinti reflects on Ballen’s images with original texts written in the form of elegies, prayers, and laments.” A bi-lingual edition, Italian and English.

B.C. the Black Clown [Ralph Tunstel]. The Many Tears of a Black Clown. Bay Company Books, 2020. Poems with numerous full-page b&w photographs by the author.

Sheri Benning. Field Requiem. Carcanet, 2021. A requiem for a vanishing way of life on the Canadian prairies and the collapse of the family farm. With b&w photographs.

Verónica Gerber Bicecci. La Compañía. Pepitas de calabaza, 2021. From the Amazon description of the 2025 English edition: “Based on a trip to the now abandoned Mexican mercury mining town of San Felipe Nuevo Mercurio, La Compañía explores the development of mercury mining as a technology and its present environmental consequences, both predictable and unforeseen, in what Cristina Rivera Garza [who writes the Epilogue] terms “an exemplary disappropriative work.” In a book that subverts both textual and graphic expectations, part a involves a rewriting of Amparo Dávila’s “The Houseguest” [a short story], changing specific aspects of the text: verb tenses are transposed to the future; the houseguest becomes the menacing presence of La Compañía; and the domestic helper who suffers the intimidation of La Compañía along with her unnamed female employer is the machine. In part b, scientific reports dating from the 1950s to the present day, conversations with experts and miners, and excerpts from the story of “Long, Tall José” construct a history of mercury mining in the area and the subsequent environmental contamination. In both sections, text is accompanied by images that range from Gerber Bicecci’s intervened photographs of the ghost town and the surrounding area to technical diagrams and reinterpreted maps, plus pictograms from Manuel Felguérez’s La máquina estética (1975).

Andrew Lanyon. Compartments in the Heart of Rowley Hall. St. Ives: self-published, 2021. The “paper” published is by Vera Rowley of Rowley Hall, the historic home and site of many of Lanyon’s bits of farce. Vera’s paper hopes to distinguish between “photographs” and “snapshots,” using as examples some of the worst and funniest amateur photographs one might ever see. The paper was, needless to say, rejected by the English Psychoanalytical Society. Published in an edition of 100 copies.

Dan O’Brien. Survivor’s Notebook. Cincinnati: Acre Books, 2021. A prose poem with thirty-five photographs about how he and his wife both struggled with cancer at the same time, while raising a daughter.

Antonio Tabucchi. Stories with Pictures. Archipelago, 2021. From the publisher’s website: “Tabucchi responds to paintings, drawings, and photographs from his dual homelands of Italy and Portugal, among other countries. This collection’s varied writings include stories, essays, journal entries, poems.” Translated from Italian original by Elizabeth Harris.

Gabriele Tinti. Ruins. Eris, 2021. Ekphrastic poetry with photographs of classical art and sculpture by various photographers. Translated from the 2018 Italian original by David Graham.

Asiya Wadud. No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. NY: Nightboat Books, 2021. Wadud’s poetics begin in a place beyond everyday logic, as she strives for something more physical, performative, visceral, more like choreography. Plants, bees, and birds abound. She nods to Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, and the artist Torkwase Dyson, and includes a few of her own b&w photographs of hands and torsos.

David Bradford. Dream of No One but Myself. Brick Books, 2022. From the publisher’s website: “Through a complex juxtaposition of lyric verse and self-erasure, family keepsake and transformed photo, David Bradford engages the gap between the drive toward self-understanding and the excavated, tangled narratives autobiography can’t quite reconcile.”

Jay Carmichael. Marlo. Victoria Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2022. From Amazon: “It’s the 1950s in conservative Australia, and Christopher, a young gay man, moves to “the City” to escape the repressive atmosphere of his tiny hometown. Once there, however, he finds that it is just as censorial and punitive, in its own way. Then Christopher meets Morgan, and the two fall in love―a love that breathes truth back into Christopher’s stifled life. But the society around them remains rigid and unchanging, and what begins as a refuge for both men inevitably buckles under the intensity of navigating a world that wants them to refuse what they are. Will their devotion be enough to keep them together? In reviving a time that is still so recent yet so vastly different from now, Jay Carmichael has drawn on archival material, snippets of newspaper articles, and photos to create the claustrophobic environment in which these two men lived and loved.” With 8 period photographs, all credited: 4 from State Library Victoria; 1 from State Library of New South Wales; 3 from Australian Queer Archives.

Golden. A DEAD NAME THAT LEARNED HOW TO LIVE. Boston: Game Over Books, 2022. According to the publisher’s website: the title “weaves poems, family photographs, & self-portraits to share a journey of survival & living in the American south. Exploring themes of loss & legacy, nation & love language, forgiveness & fortitude, Blackness & being, Golden continually asks–What shifts within & around us when we choose to name ourselves & our kin here–our tragedy & triumphs, our human failures & feelings, our desires to be free? [It was released] on their parent’s 30th wedding anniversary.”

Robert Kloss. Light No More. Inside the Castle, 2022. An experimental novel, sometimes described as a cult “horror” novel, with many full-page b&w photographs, some of which might be post-mortem images. Kloss says he was influenced by David Lynch. Some readers can’t make heads or tails of his books, but like them, nonetheless. This is a reprint of an earlier self-published version.

Andrew Lanyon. Pinpoint of the Yard Investigates the Cultural Crime of the Century in Saint Ives. St. Ives: self-published, 2022. I have another small group of self-published books by Andrew Lanyon to read. In this small humorously illustrated book, a detective from Scotland Yard (one presumes) arrives. The crime? Apparently at a recent exhibition, a seascape had been shown upside down, and ever since the artists of St. Ives have been making their art upside down. “The result was yet another new art form.” The criminal was never discovered. Two photographs are included to demonstrate the difference between Order and Chaos for the benefit of the reader. Published in an edition of 75 copies.

John Matthias & Laura Matthia Bendoly. Sight Lines. Dos Madres Press, 2022. A father-daughter collaboration, with the daughter contributing forty photographs and asking her father to create poetry in response.

Courtney Faye Taylor. Concentrate. Graywolf, 2022.Much of Taylor’s book deals with the murder of Latasha Harlins, the young Black girl killed by a Los Angeles Korean shop owner, after being falsely accused of stealing a bottle of juice. The ensuing trial, which resulted in no prison time, was among the events that led to the start of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. Other poems deal with issues facing Black women. The book includes numerous photographs from a variety of sources.

Jordan Abel. Empty Spaces. McClelland & Stewart, 2023. Abel’s book of prose poems contains an unknown number of photographs by the author. The two that can be seen in the Amazon preview are vertical collaged panoramic landscape images divided by a thin winding strip that resembles a symbol for a river.

Colin Channer. Console. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023. Amazon says: “With allusive links to photography, music, sea mammals, mistranslation, and the universal ritual of ‘the walk,’ Console reorganizes our sense of time, collapses and rebreaks the remembered and certain, renames the familiar, reaches for settled etymologies, and turns words inside out.” With ten b&w photographs (three by Karol Kozlowski, the remainder credited to the Providence (RI) Athenaeum).

Claire Donato. Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts. Brooklyn: Archway Editions, 2023. Several of Donato’s stories contain drawings and color photographs.

Rikki Ducornet. The Plotinus. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2023. A brief dystopian novel about a man imprisoned by a robot called the Plotinus (after the Greek philosopher). During his imprisonment, he thinks about philosophy, science, and freedom. Interspersed are cyanotype images of trees by Michael Eastman (the book is also printed in cyan type).

Benjamin Labatut. The Maniac. NY: Penguin, 2023. Labatut’s second book focusing on the lives of mathematicians and physicists who have brought about the modern world of atomic bombs, artificial intelligence, and other “advances” that threaten the future of mankind, contains three b&w photographs of selected men from the book.

Erin Marie Lynch. Removal Acts. Graywolf Press, 2023. Lynch, a direct descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, writes about her ancestors, the 1863 Federal Act that removed them from their lands, her family, and herself. Her poetry often includes quotations from other poets and writers and from historical documents. She uses light and dark typefaces, strikethrough, and other techniques to make historical points of weave borrowed texts through hers. The book ends with a sequence of five b&w self-portraits as she puts on and takes off her great grandmother’s Camp Fire Girls dress.new

Javier Marías. Tomás Nevinson. Knopf, 2023. Marías’s final novel contains a single photograph of the aftermath of a terrorist bombing, credited to Pere Tordera, 1992. Translated from the 2021 Spanish original by Margaret Jull Costa.

Paisley Rekdal. West: A Translation. Copper Canyon Press, 2023. From Amazon: “In 2018, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad. The result is West: A Translation—an unflinching hybrid collection of poems and essays that draws a powerful, necessary connection between the railroad’s completion and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained during the Chinese Exclusion Act, is a poem elegizing a detainee who committed suicide. As West translates this anonymous Chinese elegy character by character, what’s left is a haunting narrative distilled through the history and lens of transcontinental railroad workers, and a sweeping exploration of the railroad’s cultural impact on America. Punctuated by historical images and told through multiple voices, languages, literary forms and documents, West explores what unites and divides America, and how our ideas about American history creep forward, even as the nation itself constantly threatens to spiral back.West is accompanied by a website (www.westtrain.org) which features video poems and encourages self-exploration of the transcontinental railroad’s history through an interactive, non-linear structure.”

Gabriele Tinti & Andres Serrano. Confessions. Eris, 2023. According to Amazon: “Tinti and Andres Serrano have produced a haunting meditation on religion, violence, and physicality. Tinti . . . has produced a sequence of poems that are as remarkable for their lyrical expressiveness as for their forceful compactness. Often disquieting and always uncompromising in their vision of the human capacity to do harm and be harmed . . . Tinti’s verses accompany a series of images composed by Serrano [which] engage provocatively with the visual legacy of the Christian and classical traditions.”

Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers. Upstage. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024. To quote the blog Jacket2, “Upstage combines found poetry by Bruce Andrews and photography by Sally Silvers to illustrate the disjointed and sometimes surreal reality of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. The poems’ titles use the letters a,b, and c to indicate their focuses, which range from the past, present, or future, to verbs and nouns, to different types of the ‘sublime’.”

Steve Barbaro. Plane of Consummate Finitude. New Sinews, 2024. I defer to the brilliant review by the Irish poet Billy Mills on this title. It begins: “Steve Barbaro’s Plane of Consummate Finitude is something else again, not so much a book as an experience. Printed on glossy paper, the pages have the look of a cross between 1980s video game design, rough graffiti, punk zines and Japanese visual poetry of the 1950s onwards. The design closely matches that of Barbaro’s newnewsinews website. But mostly the text sits in long lines that let it breathe, with jpeg titles, overlays, photomontages and oddly scrawled words and phrases (‘who cares’ and ‘OK shhhh’ recur) like when you try to write with the cursor in Paint. It’s a book you don’t so much read as immerse yourself in.” Read Billy Mills regularly!

Sara Baume. “It Is Decidedly So.” A short story in response to twenty-eight photographs from different photographers from the Magnum Photos group. Posted on the online edition of Granta April 29, 2024 at https://granta.com/it-is-decidedly-so/.

Bruce Bond and Walter Cochran-Bond. Lunette. Green Linden Press, 2024. From the publisher’s website: “Poet Bruce Bond and photographer Walter Cochran-Bond explore brokenness—culturally, physically, and psychologically—as a summons, a plea for greater outreach and self-understanding. In dialogue across an intimate distance, poems and photographs deepen their engagement as independent sources, enlarging conversation through forms of interrogation as opposed to mere translation or description. As a figure of fragmentation, intrinsic to both vitality and crisis, the lunette voices what it, in turn, would question, be it openness or exclusion, recovery or loss, trauma or the ache of the phantom wound.”

Charles Boyle. Invisible Dogs. London: CB Editions, 2024. According to the publisher’s website, this novel “is the travel diary of an English writer invited to a country in which there are no dogs – but he keeps seeing them, vanishing around corners. There are rumours of dogs gathering in the mountains, preparing for an assault on the city.” It contains three photographs by Wiesiek Powaga and one each by Julian Rothenstein and Natalia Zagórska-Thomas.

Christoph Bruneel, QUEMHRF ! L’âne qui butine, 2024. Apparently, an uncharacterizable novel, with wordplay, memories, quotations, poems, dialogues, typographical games, and seven photographs by the author.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley. “The One It Came All This Way For.” Four poems in response to twenty-eight photographs from different photographers from the Magnum Photos group. Posted on the online edition of Granta April 29, 2024 at https://granta.com/the-one-it-came-all-this-way-for/.

Don Mee Choi. Mirror Nation. Seattle: Wave Books, 2024. This is the final book in her Korean trilogy, which includes DMZ Colony (2020) and Hardly War (2016). Mirror Nation is a mix of prose, poetry, and photographs. The book’s main themes are memory and the flow of time, while the main subject she writes about is the Gwangju Massacre of May 1980, which took place while she was still a child in Korea. Choi also makes many references to the time she spent writing this book in Berlin, which was also once a divided city in much the same way that Korea remains a divided country.

Gujraj Chureetur. Kamla, the Abused Housewife: An Illustrated Photo Novel. Self-published, 2024. From Amazon: “Through a powerful blend of vivid photography and poignant storytelling, this illustrated photo novel unravels the heart-wrenching journey of Kamla, a woman trapped in an abusive marriage. Set against the contrasting backdrops of domestic confinement and the vibrant world beyond, the narrative follows her silent struggles, moments of resilience, and ultimate quest for liberation.”

Cloak. Psalmist Kaput. Minneapolis: Cloak, 2024. From Amazon: “Through the harsh noise of reality, a signal appears. At first faint, but slowly, as we approach, it grows louder, more defined. Aerial photographs depict odd structures and garbled sounds, blurred images of decaying media, alien architecture. It calls out your name. Psalmist Kaput lures the reader into a miasma of fragmented speech, disembodied voices, deteriorating thresholds, and lo-res nightmares. Fusing text and image, it is a work undefinable and wholly its own.”

Teju Cole. Pharmakon. Mack, 2024. Carefully sequenced photographs are interspersed between very short stories by Cole. He talks about this book in an interview with Alice Zoo on Granta online.

Tyree Day. a little bump in the earth. Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2024. Tyree Daye. a little bump in the earth. Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2024. Daye turns Youngsville NC, the town where he grew up, into a “Ritual House” through a series of poems that celebrate his family, past and present, and Black knowledge and traditions. This “little bump on the earth” that he imagines is a safe place, a Black community without clocks, without violence or worry. Daye uses several color photocollages and family documents and census records to create a small “museum” of his family’s history.

Stephen Downes. Mural. Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2024. In Downes’ novel, an institutionalized Australian psychopath is writing about his obsessions with several historical figures, including the sexologist Havelock Ellis. The novel contains many photographs, some of which a reproductions of works of art.

Steve Ely & Michael Faint. Orasaigh. Broken Sleep Books, 2024. Poetry by Ely and photographs by Faint inspired by the landscape around the tidal island of Orasaigh, located on the coast of South Uist at Boisdale.

Caleb Femi. The Wickedest. 4th Estate/HarperCollins, 2024. According to the publisher: “Welcome to the Wickedest, the longest running house party in the South London shoob scene, always held at an undisclosed inner-city spot. Sweaty and cinematic, pulsing with rhythm and heat, every moment here—from one-on-one intimacies to the swell of the party’s collective roar—is refracted in Caleb Femi’s writing. Ingeniously blending conversations, text messages, sonnets, vignettes, monologues, photos, and lyrics.”

Mike Fox. Things Grown Different. Manchester: Configo, 2024. A collection of five stories by Fox, with photographs by Nicholas Royle in response to the stories. The book is the fourth in the publisher’s series of collaborations between writers and artists.

Herbert Gold & Ari Gold, with Ethan Gold. Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems. Rare Bird Books, 2024. From Amazon: “When the global pandemic forced his ninety-six-year-old father into isolation, filmmaker Ari Gold became concerned that loneliness would kill his father’s spirits. . .So, Ari mailed his father a poem, asking for one in return. Later, Ari’s twin brother, Ethan, also got into the game. . . The father and his sons write tenderly of their hunger for connection, about the woman that all three men have lost (a mother, a wife), and about the passion that all three seek.” With archival photographs.

Jindřich Heisler & Jindřich Štyrský. On the Needles of These Days. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2024. Visual artist Jindřich Štyrský’s photographs from the 1930s are combined with an extended prose poem by fellow Surrealist Jindřich Heisler. On the Needles of These Days was originally published clandestinely in Nazi-occupied Prague in 1941 as a samizdat edition of very few copies by Edice Surrealismu. It was then officially published in December 1945 by Fr. Borovy in Prague. This edition is limited to 700 copies. The book’s layout is based on Karel Teige’s original design. From the publisher’s website: “While Štyrský’s photos capture the daily marvelous of shop windows, mannequins, masks, wigs, prostheses, flea markets, and fairground iconography, Heisler’s text responding to the images can be read as an allusive appeal to resistance and hope.” Translated from the original Czech by Jed Slast.

Derek Jarman. A Finger in the Fishes Mouth. Prototype, 2024. A facsimile edition of Jarman’s sole, early, extremely rare poetry book, originally published in 1972. A facsimile that retains the book’s original format, with a silver mirror cover. Inside, an image from Jarman’s collection of postcards accompanies each poem, which is printed in a striking green ink. Additional material comes in the form of a Foreword and Afterwords by So Mayer, Tony Peake and Keith Collins. An earlier sold-out facsimile edition by House Sparrow Press was issued in 2014.

Sylvia Jones. Television Fathers. Chicago: Meekling Press, 2024. Her six poems “Bamboozled” #s 1-6 are each accompanied by full page reproductions from David Levinthal’s series “Blackface,” 1995-1998. The cover photograph shows the author’s late grandparents, uncles, and mother.

Diana Khoi Nguyen. Root Fracture. Scribner, 2024. Nguyen’s second book of poetry after her 2018 Ghost Of also includes some photographs. According the the publicity, the book deals with “a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, [and] a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely.”

Alexander Kluge. War Primer. Seagull Books, 2024. The title recalls Bertolt Brecht’s book of the same name from 1947. From the publisher’s website: “Blending simple stories with multimedia and reflecting on human responses and hope, the author does not aim to take sides nor make an appeal. Rather, he is concerned with what he calls “mole war,” the tenacious and often subterranean survival of war—what war makes of people and what life of its own it is capable of.” Numerous images, some photographic.

Aviva Lilith. Unperfect: Poems and Photographs from a Hometown. Alien Buddha Press, 2024. From Amazon: “a raw confession of the streets and spaces we think we know, yet rarely see. . .” Photographs by the author.

JoAnne McFarland. American Graphic. ‎ Green Linden Press, 2024. Poetry with images. From the publisher’s website: “Juxtaposing historical documents—recipes from the first cookbook published by a Black woman in the States, reward posters for people fleeing enslavement—with intimate moments from the present, the book’s magic is to bend time so we see that the past’s rivers flow through us into the future. Spare yet lyrical in its language, American Graphic is a concentrate of feeling and vision.”

Marquavious Moore. Summons: poems + photos. Self-published, 2024. From the website of the actor/poet: “This collection of poems explores the heart of the Black experience, touching on personal struggle, societal challenges, and the resilience that defines us. Through emotion and social commentary, the poems address issues of race, justice, and heritage while celebrating strength and community. The accompanying black-and-white photography, with subtle hints of brown, reflects both the beauty and the struggles within marginalized communities. Together, the poems and images tell a pro-Black story of resilience, cultural pride, and the ongoing fight for equality.” The photographs are by the author.

Derek Owusu. “Sakraman.” A short story written in response to twenty-nine photographs from different photographers from the Magnum Photos group. Posted to the online edition of Granta April 29, 2024 at https://granta.com/sakraman/.

Christoph Ramnsmayr. Egal wohin, Baby: Mikroromane. S. Fischer, 2024. Short narratives in German accompanied by seventy of the author’s own photographs. A man visualizes his life in b&w snapshots.

Lauren Russell. A Window that Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance. Milkweed Editions, 2024. Partly memoir, partly poetry, partly other. The latter category includes various kinds of geometric figures that are meant to be cut out and folded (an homage to Tyehimba Jess’s Olio) and torn paper collages depicting anthropomorphized cats. The collages use some photographic elements in their construction. The book deals with the author’s suicide attempts, love affairs, and Asperger’s, among other topics. Rimbaud, Roland Barthes, and David Wojnarowicz also appear. Books of poetry increasingly include a section called something like “Notes” at the end these days; the “Notes” section in this title runs 24 pages long.

Susan M. Schultz. I and Eucalyptus. Lavender Ink, 2024. From the publisher’s website: A “series of meditative poems, or poetic meditations, on the relationship between the writer and a tree, by way of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, including twenty-one full color photographs of the tree. Schultz’s obsession with a solitary eucalyptus in a neighborhood park opens up space for discussions of self and other (as well as dog), creation and decreation, accident and abstraction in art, politics and spirituality, and much else. . . Answers, of course, are all more questions, for the book is more quest than end-point. Each section is accompanied by a photograph of the tree’s drips and drabs; greens, reds and yellows; its peeling bark and black sap.”

Francis Spufford. Cahokia Jazz. NY: Scribner, 2024. Spufford’s detective novel is set in the 1920s world of speakeasies and jazz, but in the heart of the still thriving indigenous nation located in Cahokia, Illinois, and it contains several uncredited period photographs.

Agnieszka Taborska. The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks. Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2024. A brief novel with Surrealist photocollages by Selena Kimball. “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. . . 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.” (Quote taken from the publisher’s website.) Translated from the 2013 original Polish by Ursula Phillips.

Asiya Wadud. Mandible Wishbone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. Wadud’s most recent book of poems is rich in intimations, wordplay, imagery that seems to lie just beyond one’s ability to imagine. The book is about connections, often between things or words that shouldn’t seem to flow into each other. “Lateral logic,” as she writes. This feels like the verbal edging toward the non-verbal, as if poetry could become dance. Every once in a while she includes eerie color photographs of hands or body parts or cloths. A sentence from the final page just about describes this book: “It is ardent, incandescent.”

Jonathan Walker. Push Process. London: Ortac Press, 2024. Richard is a Cambridge University student doing research in Venice for his Ph.D., when he is lent a Polaroid camera. This begins a sudden interest in photography, which eventually sidetracks his plans for a doctoral degree. The book follows Richard and a small group of his Venice-based friends over several years, during which he thinks more deeply about what photography is and how he wants to pursue the practice of photography. The book is illustrated with over fifty beautifully printed b&w photographs of Venice taken by the author. I wrote more about this title here.

Rebecca Norris Webb. A Difficulty Is a Light. Marseilles: Chose Commune, 2024. An elegy for the artist’s brother in poems and 15 color photographs by the poet. It includes notes on the many inspirations for both the images and texts.

Elizabeth Willis. Liontaming in America. NY: New Directions, 2024. The author’s website says: “Liontaming in America investigates the utopian aspirations fleetingly enacted in the polyamorous life of a nineteenth-century religious community, interweaving archival and personal threads with the histories of domestic labor, extraction economies, and the performance of family in theater, film, and everyday life. Lines reverberate between worldliness and devotion, between Peter Pan and Close Encounters, between Paul Robeson and Maude Adams, between leaps of faith and passionate alliances, between everyday tragedy and imaginative social possibility.”

Joaquín Zihuatanejo. Occupy Whiteness. Deep Vellum, 2024. According to the publisher’s website: “a collection of hybrid erasure poems. Starting from long-form works of literature by straight, white men, Joaquín Zihuatanejo occupies their pages, erasing words and sections, leaving only his poetry behind — the white space that remains becoming colonized Brown verse.” According to Amazon, the poems “interspersed photography from the border.”

Raul Zurita and Martin Gusinde. Poesia y Nuevo Mundo. Gabinete Paratextual, 2024. From the publisher’s website: “The first Portuguese translation of Raúl Zurita’s poem Poetry and the New World by Bruno Ministro. In this text, the Chilean poet tells us that, despite feeling South American, he thinks, dreams and imagines in a language that doesn’t belong to him: Spanish. Split down the middle, the edition contains a graphic exploration with photographs of the Selkmans and Yámanas taken by Martin Gusinde between 1921 and 1922 in Tierra del Fuego.”

Nadia Alexis. Beyond the Watershed. CavanKerry Press, 2025. A powerful volume of poems and photography that deal with her parents journey from Haiti to the U.S. and the struggle that both she and her mother face with men and violence. In the final poem: “Woman no longer endangered.” The volume contains eight full-page evocative photographs by the author, each showing a woman in a white dress who is blurred and in motion in a forest setting.

Joshua Beckman. Firefly. Holyoke, MA: The Brother In Elysium, 2025. Firefly consists of sixteen poems Beckman wrote during the summer of 2018, with four new photo collages by Jon Beacham responding to the text. These poems were written during Beckman’s first summer living in the woods in upstate New York, where he spent more time with non-human creatures than human ones. Firefly resumes a conversation between the poet and artist that began ten years earlier with the book Porch Light: lamp and chair (2012). Letterpress edition of 225 copies.

Max Besora. The Fake Muse. Rochester: Open Letter, 2025. According to the publisher, The Fake Muse is “infused with the spirit of pulp fiction, b-movies, zines, and punk rock.” The Amazon preview shows two photographs in less than a dozen sample opening pages. It’s not clear how many more images there might be. Translated from the 2020 Catalan original by Mara Faye Lethem.

David Bevan. Sightings. Manchester: Configo, 2025. Sightings is a collection of six stories by Bevan, with photographs by Maya Sharp in response to the stories. The book is the sixth in a series of collaborations between writers and artists. Set mostly in the South Pennines, these stories offer a glimpse into the lives of characters diverted by the birds they encounter.

Claude Cahun. Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals). Siglio, 2025. A new edition of Cahun’s 1930 masterpiece Aveux non Avenus (Paris: Édition due Carrefour). From the publisher’s website: “Thoughtfully redesigned to emulate the original artist’s book, this revised edition of the out-of-print English translation by Susan de Muth—originally published in the UK by the Tate in 2007 and in the U.S. by MIT Press in 2008—includes novelist and critic Pierre Mac Orlan’s original 1930 preface along with contemporary essays by scholar Amelia Groom and translator de Muth.” The Tate/MIT volumes were simply titled Disavowals. Cahun’s text is accompanied by a number of photocollages created in collaboration with her partner Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Malherbe).

brittny ray crowell. Cord Swell. Norton, 2025. crowell sifts through decades of obituaries, journals, and other ephemera to exhume the generations of her family from her hometown of Texarkana, Texas. She preserves her relatives’ stories in writing and in works of collage, a style of archive that layers the past and the present literally and poetically. Scattered among the poems are six collages that all use elements of photographs.

Susan Daitch. The Adjudicator. Bend, OR: Green City Books, 2025. Daitch’s cyberpunk mystery about a genetically-coded populated surveillance state contains public domain images obtained via Wikimedia commons, along with “original art created by Isaac Peterson and original photography” by the author. It also includes QR codes that lead to computer graphic videos.

Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff. Your Name Here. Dalkey Archive Press, 2025. DeWitt & Gridneff’s giant, baggy, novel-like thing about trying and failing to jointly write and publish this novel contains nineteen small photographs, nearly all relating to Italian movies of the Fellini era (i.e., film stills, promotional images, etc.)

James Elkins. A Short Introduction to Anneliese. Unnamed Press, 2025. An abbreviated and edited version of the description from the publisher: “Over dinner and then over the phone, unemployed biologist Anneliese Glur peppers Samuel Emmer with wild, seemingly endless monologues about numerous long books. She is no longer sure that she is sane, and she needs Samuel to read her book – a comprehensive theory of the essence of life, that transcends category or definition – to see if it makes sense. But Samuel is aging quickly. Her way of talking sounds to him like music and her startling ideas have evaporated, leaving only melodies.” The second in a series of five novels, following Weak in Comparison to Dreams (2023). It contains an unknown number of photographs.

Caleb Femi. The Wickedest. NY: MCD, 2025. Femi’s book of poetry is about “the longest running house party in the South London shoob scene, always held at an undisclosed inner-city spot,” according to the publisher. It contains color photographs of dance parties by the author.

Radka Franczak. godzina wieloryba. Cyranka, 2025. The title translates as “The whaling hour.” A reader says: “the author of this novel in Polish apparently wears many hats: film school graduate, screenwriter, photographer… This comes across in the choice and layout of the photographs in the book – from small snapshots embedded in the text to full-page collages, ranging from (somewhat Sebaldian) pictures of a desktop space strewn with opened volumes, notebooks, photographs, to historical images, maps, and engravings, to b&w photos of deep-sea creatures… (Franczak also designed the book’s cover.) Similarly, the writing deliberately slips between genres: storytelling, travelog, journal, fictionalized biographies, scientific research – into whales and the climate catastrophe unfolding before our eyes, and how we all fit into it.”

Verónica Gerber Bicecci. La Compañía. NY: Columbia University Press, 2025. From Bicecci’s website: “This intervention of Amparo Dávila’s short story The Houseguest and the borrowed graphic elements of Manuel Felguérez’s The Aesthetic Machine, tell the story of a mining Company’s arrival in a small town, terrorizing its inhabitants.” From the Amazon website: “Based on a trip to the now abandoned Mexican mercury mining town of San Felipe Nuevo Mercurio, La Compañía explores the development of mercury mining as a technology and its present environmental consequences, both predictable and unforeseen, in what Cristina Rivera Garza [who writes the Epilogue] terms ‘an exemplary disappropriative work’.” La Compañía involves a rewriting of Amparo Dávila’s short story The Houseguest, changing specific aspects of the text (i.e. verb tenses are transposed to the future) so that the houseguest becomes a menacing presence and the domestic helper who suffers the intimidation of La Compañía along with her unnamed female employer is the machine. A second part includes scientific reports dating from the 1950s to the present day, conversations with experts and miners, and excerpts from the story of Long, Tall José, which construct a history of mercury mining in the area and the subsequent environmental contamination. Both sections are accompanied by images that range from Gerber Bicecci’s intervened photographs of the ghost town and the surrounding area to technical diagrams and reinterpreted maps, plus pictograms from Manuel Felguérez’s La máquina estética (1975). Translated from the 2021 Spanish original by Christina MacSweeney.

Golden. Reprise: Poems and Photographs. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2025. According to Amazon: “Golden’s collection illuminates a path through national uprisings, anti-trans violence, family loss, and a global pandemic.” His color photographs include many self-portraits (see the cover for a good example), images of family & friends, and old family snapshots. This is Golden’s second collection of poetry & photography after their A Dead Name That Learned How to Live (2022).

Susan Howe. Penitential Cries. NY: New Directions, 2025. The long, seemingly autobiographical title poem is about aging, healthcare, and death, and includes numerous uncited, tantalizing quotations as the poet thinks about the poets and poetry of the past. The other major poem is “Sterling Park in the Dark,” which consists of fifty pages of her “woven” poems, which are made from parts of phrases, words, and individual letters woven together architectonically, reminding us how suggestive written language can be even when we cannot glimpse the context or the connection of the words on view. The book contains one photograph of the sailboat “Exit,” taken from N.L. Stebbin’s book The Yachtsman’s Album (Boston, 1896).

Caleb Klaces. Mr. Outside. London: Prototype, 2025. A son and an aging father, who is about to move to a care center, spend a difficult weekend together attempting to grapple with memories, discoveries, fears, and regrets. The novel includes a dozen or so small b&w photographs, which are apparently by the author.

Hervé Le Tellier. The Name on the Wall. Open Letter, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “Struck by a name written on a facade of his new home, Le Tellier embarked on a quest to recover the history of André Chaix, a resistance fighter, a maquisard, killed at the age of 20 in August 1944.” A novel not unlike those of Patrick Modiano, The Name on the Wall combines historical fragments with fiction. It contains a number of photographs documenting Chaix’s life.

Patrick Modiano & Christian Mazzalai. 70 bis, entrée des artistes. Gallimard, 2025. The book revisits a single Paris address—70 bis, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs—and explores the afterlife of a place once teeming with artists, intrigue, and chance encounters. Includes many historic photographs and some reproductions of documents. An example of history blending with fiction.

Joni Murphy. Barbara. Astra House: 2025. From the Amazon description: “Barbara is born shortly before World War II and lives through the conflict as a desert child trailing her father, an engineer in the famed and infamous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her beautiful, sensitive mother commits suicide. From that point on, these twin poles—the historic and the personal, the political and the violently intimate—vie for control of Barbara’s consciousness. As Barbara grows up and becomes a successful actress, traveling the world between film sets and love affairs, she takes on and sheds various roles—vampire’s victim and frontier prostitute; a saint and a bored housewife. She marries and divorces and marries again, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be the love of her life. Though they are not faithful to each other, their relationship provides the most enduring anchor in a remarkable life turbulent with fiction.” The novel contains an unknown number of photographs.

Candace R. Nunag. A Solar Flare. Fiction Collective 2, 2025. According to the publisher: “A flood of illumination, a cosmic cataclysm frozen in time—the Carrington Event of 1859 was the most disruptive solar flare in recorded history, an electromagnetic storm that wiped out telegraph systems across the world and which, if it were to occur today, might well destroy anything on the planet with an electrical circuit. A Solar Flare is a hybrid of short essays, research notes, poems, graphite rubbings, and instant photographs, as well as bits of flash fiction, all simultaneously contemplating technology and memory, while preoccupied with the 1859 solar flare. The ghost of the Carrington Event haunts A Solar Flare with the promise of definitive answers about the narrator’s many severed connections: her digital, supernatural, eastern, western, and analog past.”

Cait O’Kane. The Wasted Land. Tripwire Journal, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “This documentary poem by Cait O’Kane is modeled after T.S. Eliot’s epic poem The Wasteland. It serves as a textual map of graffiti, narcotics, blight, & gentrification in the ‘changing neighborhood’ of Kensington, Philadelphia. Once a working-class enclave, this section of Philly has been portrayed internationally as the epicenter of the so-called ‘opioid epidemic’ enveloping the U$A. Punctuated by O’Kane’s photography, The Wasted Land moves through Kensington’s streets, avenues, & alleys, exploring intersections of capital, dispossession, development, & despair as the true epidemic plaguing its people.” It includes an unknown number of photographs.

Frances Presley. Black Fens Viral. Shearsman, 2025. Rectangular prose-poems that the author says are “the Black Fens [which] also brought back memories of my childhood in Lincolnshire. Depopulated by mechanised agriculture, it was a lonely landscape, as well as an ecological disaster.” The book uses photographs, some taken by the poet, some borrowed from a 1970s book on the flatlands, and some printed as negatives.

Martha Ronk. Clay: Bodies + Matter. Omnidawn, 2025. From the publisher: In a book-length series of pems and photographs, “Martha Ronk moves through the steps of creating a pot that must be formed, dried, bisque-fired, glazed, and fired again. This practice is paralleled in Ronk’s process-oriented language that addresses how we read texture and color, the ways history and landscapes appear in glazes, Mimbres bowls that covered the faces of the dead, and Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings of ceramic forms. . . Clay includes observations from other potters and writers as well as small photographs of pots.” I have not seen the book to verify who took the photographs.

Gerhard Rühm. The Folded Clock: 100 number poems. Prague: Twisted Spoon, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “Blurring the distinction between “counting” and “recounting,” his “recitations” imaginatively translate arithmetic vocabulary into the mundane, the existential, or the cosmic, such as a history of the universe narrated as a solar year, from the Big Bang on January 1 to the moon landing in the last seconds of New Year’s Eve. Rühm’s images and texts unleash the sensual qualities of numerals to subvert our digit-filled environment with its pervasive intensification of seamless control.” The Folded Clock involves text, musical scores, and images (including at least one photograph), all, apparently, by the Austrian Rühm. Translated from the 2023 German original by Alexander Booth.

Vik Shirley. Persona Digitalia. Photoworks, 2025. Fabric-like photographs in tight grids, beneath which are prose poems in which the poet “converses” with the images.

Dr. Ranganatha Sitaram. The Passing Spell: Life’s Kaleidoscope of Photo-Poems. Self-published, 2025. Dr. Sitaram is scientific director of brain imaging and more at St. Jude’s Research Hospital. The Passing Spell is “is an offering of photographs and poems from my life and travels in different parts of the world.”

Jeet Thayil. The Elsewhereans. Harper Collins India, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “From the backwaters of Kerala to the streets of Bombay, Hong Kong, Paris and beyond, Thayil maps the restless lives of those shaped by separation – both the ones who leave and the ones left behind. A hypnotic meditation on migration, loss, and the fragile threads of identity from one of the most brilliant voices in contemporary literature, The Elsewhereans is a novel of retrieval and reinvention—an elegy for vanished worlds, and a reckoning with the histories we inherit.” One reviewer described it as “a genre-defying novel that melds fiction, travelogue, memoir, a ghost story, a family saga, photographs and much else into a tale that unfolds across continents and decades.”

Gabriele Tinti & Roger Ballen. Hungry Ghosts. Eris, 2025. A collaboration between the Italian poet Tinti and the South African photographer Ballen. According to Amazon: Hungry Ghosts draws “inspiration from the Petavatthu verses of the Buddhist tradition,” and is an “evocation of the disturbing visions and the yearnings for a world beyond that have fed both ancient and modern understandings of the afterlife.”

R.L. Edmondson Vance. The Goddess Fortune: To Proper Is To Die. Self-published, 2025. From Amazon: “I am visual artist who uses a variety of media to explore feminist themes and the self. My approach to both art and poetry is the same; collage. I find images or words I am innately attracted to, cut them out, arranging and rearranging until I find the perfect picture. I am heavily influenced by the found object; discarded magazines, the sky in a piece of junk mail, the still frame of a paused movie, the shape of a scrap of paper, any likeness or shape that calls to me. I consider the images of prehistoric goddess figurines, paramount and central to my own art, as a found object; Something someone was compelled to create that was lost or discarded, then found again. My poems are inspired by the found word; fortune cookies, passing billboards, my teenage diaries, made up and mis-heard songs, overheard conversations, grocery lists, and all other manner of words heard or seen in serendipitous encounters. I use collage to create a sacred space for these images and words, ancient and new. I feed myself found words and images; digesting, reconstructing, honoring form and phrase, creating a sacred place for each, and then gluing every one down in its rightful place.” Her collages frequently use bits and pieces of photographs.

Anne Waldman. Mesopotopia. Penguin, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “Mesopotopia explores the vast sweep of our accelerating, precipitous world. From the cradle to the grave, from the mysterious poetic origins of Mesopotamia to our own dystopias of the twenty-first century.” The book reportedly has about a dozen photographs scattered throughout.

Bryan Washington. Palaver. ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025. Washington’s novel is about a Jamaican mother and her gay son who is working as an English tutor in Tokyo as they attempt to find reconciliation. It opens with three full-page b&w photographs of Tokyo and has additional such photographs between each section. The photographs are by the author.

Myriam Watthe-Delmotte. Indemne: Où va Moby-Dick? Actes Sud, 2025. A reader says: “A book which imagines an original edition of the white whale changing hands and traveling across time. Narrated by Ishmael, strangely immortal, shipwreck survivor, the novel follows the fate of the book from the hands of its author to modern times. It’s not about engaging with Melville’s text per se, as wondering about the effect a book may have on a life. It includes some color images (reproductions of paintings) as well as photographs.”

Adèle Yon. Mon vrai nom est Elisabeth. Éditions Sous-Sol, 2025 An investigation into the life of the author’s grandmother, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and underwent a lobotomy. The book is based on the doctoral dissertation of the author, who is a novelist. Although this is primarily a work of biography/auto-fiction, there is apparently a fair amount of fiction involved. In French.

Andrew Zawacki. Endscape. Photoworks, 2025. According to the publisher: “the writing speaks more explicitly of its author’s experience as a citizen laboring under the convening pressures of climate collapse, forever war, acute political distress, and the directives of global capital run amok.Photographs of Southern U.S. landscapes by the poet. From the publisher’s P5 photography and poetry pamphlet series.