Book of No Ledge: Visual Poems

As usual, it starts with love. I had my heart set on the door-to-door encyclopedia salesboy. So begins Nance Van Winckel’s latest collection of poetically altered encyclopedia entries that feature a mixture of quirky social satire and absurdist wit.

Entries like
The Importance of Mood to Man
use an encyclopedic tone to insist:
Your body is two-thirds water. Mood is one-third body
and
Life and health depend on the mood taken into the body each day.
An anatomic diagram of the nose is accompanied by the promise,
A nose can smell rain coming.
Alongside illustrations of the vestibule, the meatus, and the conchus can be found lines of text like,
As the one you love steps onto / your stoop / a widening wind / underscores the sky’s pummel.
Reminiscent of recent visual-poetic hybrids by such writers as Matthea Harvey and Bianca Stone, Van Winckel’s ground-breaking innovations must be seen to be believed.