‘Spirit Photography’ by Nick Lantz

in darkness as an image bloomed
to life on a white sheet of paper.

Can a photograph say more than a poem? What can a poem express that a picture can or cannot? In Nick Lantz’s poem, the visual and the textual become inseparable from the relationship between the speaker and their mother. The mother takes pictures of things on the edge of permanence, whether it’s a “house / burned in fire” or the speaker’s stapled abdomen. The fragility of birds nests, dying friends, and the mother’s previous travels all become revelation as a form of ars poetica for the poet-speaker.

In a poem about death and the blurred instability of the between and before, I appreciated the nod towards Emily Dickinson in my favorite lines of the poem: “[a]nd because I knew / she wanted to but would not ask, I offered—”. How we get to the poem’s end is absolutely a knock-out. This is a work that has layers of love and disturbance in how we view the world and its art.

Boaat