Belated Poem (Drop Leaf Press, 2019) is a book-length sequence of text + image diptychs distilling landscape, color, and language into a poetics of interiority. Van Horn’s spare lines and arresting photographs are narratively linked yet marked by rupture, elusion, and unsettledness. Deploying vocabularies of intimacy and ephemerality as deftly as those of abstraction, physics, and geologic time (volcanic island-building; fault-block mountains), Belated Poem ultimately speaks in human terms: perception and consciousness, shadow states, and severance at the seam of Self and Other.
Belated Poem can be ordered directly from Drop Leaf Press or found at select independent bookstores in the Bay Area, including Black Bird Bookstore, Green Apple Books on the Park, Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore, and Point Reyes Books. Read an excerpt at Elderly. Read an interview at Alta Journal.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Belated Poem speaks in a mesmerizing incantation of precision and haunting as it seeks to observe and record the vast geographies of the interstices between people. A poet with a barometer, a scientist in a fugue state, Van Horn converges photography, text, and space in order to trace the complicated textures of intimacy and distance, attachment and rupture, amid the debris of an altered relationship. From the subtle doubling in her photographs and the spatial undertow of her lines emerges a lyrical sequence that, in its unearthing of “your body next to mine at the event horizon,” also unearths the inconsolable beauty of the interior terrain and those places that are hardest to voice. —Jennifer S. Cheng
Belated Poem greets time after its becoming—exceeding a certain intensity—a relational experience or a lesson that befalls us in space. In the aftermath of “the jade- / blue slope of a line” or “the cusp of the caldera,” we become offspring of the “event horizon.” Here are vital forces—landscape, creative, combinatorial—shifting, intimate, foreshadowing and spilling us into “catastrophic events” or “a nest / out of dark matter.” Image and poem in this beautiful sequence confirm the open-ended aliveness of traces and our distributed brave interface with the world. —Hazel White