You can’t judge a book by its cover, but what if you could glean a deeper sense of a book’s content—its moods, obsessions, and concerns—in a more visceral way? What if the written words spilled beyond the pages, reimagined three-dimensionally as an assemblage of idiosyncratic objects? Intrigued by these questions, poet and artist Flower Conroy began a series of Ephemeral Altars, temporary installations inspired by books and staged within and around a shadow box. Finding the precise object to evoke a book’s spirit is as crucial as its placement in the altar, Conroy says, and if an item cannot be found, she fashions it—for instance, the blue cotton candy (pom-poms) from January Gill O’Neil’s Misery Islands (CavanKerry Press, 2014), as seen in the altar above, or the pole-dancing skeleton (a…
You're reading a preview of
Poets & Writers (Digital) - 1 Issue, March/April 2025