Optic Nerve

By Matthew Hollett

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 JM ABRAHAM POETRY AWARD

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 BMO WINTERSET AWARD

Poems using fervent whimsy and wordplay to examine photography and seeing.

Peering inside eyeballs, pondering the paradox of absent stars, and meditating on street scenes by Andr Kert sz, these poems squint sidelong at our ways of seeing the world. Through playful poems about photography and visual perception, Hollett dissects auroras and quarks, atmospheric phenomena, potatoes, bomb craters and peat bog cadavers. This darkly comic collection is shadowed by entoptic paparazzi, haunted by peripheral visions. Born of attentive walking and looking, of footsteps and snapshots, it bears witness to art history and alluvial light, portable keyholes, the pandemic, climate change, and the sheer strangeness of seeing everyday things with ecstatic eyes.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1771315997
• ISBN13: 9781771315999
• Release Date: April 2023
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.7" x 8.3"