About to Disappear To pay by check please use this order form. We are pleased to take orders from retailers. Email us with details about your order or call us at 207-837-5760. About to Disappear is a poetry collection that explores the limits of ekphrasis; that is, descriptions and reflections on works of art in order to expand their meaning. The book is separated into four sections: Ex Nihilo, Adaptation, Law of Attraction, and Ad Nihilum. The first and final sections—translated as “from nothing, returning to nothing”—act as bookends. Ex Nihilo includes poems about imagination, optics, creation, and and development; while poems in the final section, Ad Nihilum, are about trauma, unmaking, climate change ,and catastrophe. Poems in the middle sections are about artistic, psychological, and physical transformations, and natural history and community. Artworks included are from contemporary artists—as well as such artists as Vermeer, Grant Wood, John Singer Sargent, and Edward Hopper. ART / General ISBN: 978-1-962082-88-4 (print; softcover; perfect bound) Released October 14, 2025 | Copyright 2025 114 pages; 35 full-color images |
|
|
|
|
|
“According to Leonardo da Vinci, ‘Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.’ However, in Robbi Nester’s fabulous new collection, About to Disappear, nothing vanishes. We see poems, art, the poet, and the world. Nester’s lyrical conversations with artists as diverse as Joseph Cornell, Robert Rhodes, Beth Moon, Edward Hopper, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Sally Gall, and even da Vinci himself chart new territories for ekphrasis. Indeed, About to Disappear functions like a gallery in which every poem could be on a wall, talking to everything else in the room. In one of her poems to van Gogh, Nester writes, ‘I feel blessed just to be here.’ I couldn’t agree more.” “‘The mind is always brewing something . . . ’ begins the mesmerizing collection About to Disappear. Part magic trick, part treatise on the imagination, Robbi Nester’s ekphrastic poems lure and transform. ‘Any plain ingredients,’ the poet explains, ‘can rise to the occasion, becoming / a new thing.’ Gathering memories, art, science, myth, history—even furniture, sea stars, and aliens—Nester delves deeper into and far beyond our own lives. Like the octopus Nester describes in one poem, each ekphrastic response is ‘exactly the shape of whatever / it needs to be.’” —Marjorie Maddox, author of In the Museum of My Daughter's Mind and Small Earthly Space “As expansive and magical as the worlds it describes, Robbi Nester’s poetry collection, About to Disappear, is a luminous, shape-shifting exploration of perception, transformation, and the alchemy of time. By the light of ekphrastic inspiration and with the deep attention of philosophical inquiry, Nester’s poems transmute the ordinary into the extraordinary as clouds reform, light shifts, and unseen ‘roots and tubers chart their path through darkness’ beneath cold earth. ‘Subject only to the weather, we / sail above you, understand solidity / as an illusion. In time, / wire rusts. Wood grows porous, / stone swells and contracts / so often it reverts / to sand,’ Nester writes, reminding us that nothing is so permanently wrought into form that it will not eventually dissolve and reclaim its wild potential, becoming, once more, the possibility of a new becoming.” “In About to Disappear Robbi Nester takes inspiration from many different artists and perspectives, but one thing remains true: the poet is the paintbrush . . . and more. Each poem stands on its own and does not require the reader to see or know the inspirational piece. You may want to check out the art later, but there is no need to see the pieces to understand the poems.” |
|
 |
|
News and Reviews |
|
|
|
|
