Ruin
Digitally printed
72 pages, hand sewn with exposed spine
9.125 by 13.125 inches
2026
Edition of 30
The devastation of war feels unforgivable and is spreading out of control. This book is inspired by the Old English poem “The Ruin” which is preserved in a tenth-century codex known as The Exeter Book. The photographic images comprise details of scenes of Richmond at the end of the War of the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. They are from the Civil War photographs collection, 1861–1865, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
“The Ruin” describes a fallen and decaying city and has sometimes been seen as an Anglo-Saxon portrait of the ruins of Roman Bath, although there is no scholarly consensus on this view of the poem. Over time, the text itself became something of a ruin, as The Exeter Book suffered fire damage and other mistreatment, such that letters, words and even whole lines in the poem are impossible to decipher.
As part of a ruined codex, the poem embodies its own text.
Old English poetry uses the caesura, a stop in a metrical line, as a powerful structural element. I responded by using the gutter of the book as a compositional caesura.