My friend Charlie‘s got a new lit mag out called Villain Era. Appropriate for the times. He was kind enough to take some work, five visual poems concerned with the interplay of negative white space and black graphics, all composed in spreadsheets. I often use spreadsheets to underpin the page in my work (it gives me greater control on spacing), and started playing with line and cell shades. It felt similar to printmaking.
These are all part of a book project I’ve been working on for almost 20 years called Impossible Gotham. It’s a dual narrative, and one way to indicate speaker was to invert black text on white space to indicate one of the speakers (and the speaker of these poems), the anti-villain Sebastian Kyle (son of Catwoman Selena Kyle in my fanfic mutlti-verse).
Here’s a preview of one of the poems:
