This collection is in four parts and four places. The poem “Quarters,” itself split in four, opens each section. These are poems about family, friends, the city, and the sea. Writing, walking, words, and routes. The body, its beauty, its strangeness and sadness and life. Missing and distance. Libraries and streets and the night sky. And a shift—from nothing to something. Transparency can be a gorgeous lens, can be an invisible wall; glass lets the light in, but nothing else. Shifting light changes how we see, and turning and tilting makes all the difference. And when there’s nothing else, when everything is blank and bare, all you have left is a clean square of light that travels across the wall, or the shadow-shapes of leaves cast on the floor.

Seems probable, then.
You have blood in your veins
that strides in time.
Canals and channels in interchange
in warp, weft, and web arranged.

Frances Pope is a writer and French-English translator. Originally from the UK, she has been writing poetry and taking part in open mics and readings for several years, starting in Brighton in 2009 and continuing in London, in France, and in Montreal where she has lived since 2015. Her work has appeared in Carte Blanche, Asymptote, Québec Reads, L’Organe, UNAM’s Periódico de Poesía, and The Cannon’s Mouth, and is forthcoming in Phantom Drift. Frances also draws and is learning photography, and she is currently working on a project bringing together words and illustrations.