Image/text #3

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So...many of the poems in Stowaways came out of an back-and-forth email collaboration with Darryl Joel Berger, a writer/visual artist based in Kingston.

This illustration was the basis for my poem "How to be a Prince Among Men."

What I liked about this image was that the man seemed both pristine and bloodied, boyish and blase.

We'd primarily been working with female subjects at that point in our collaboration, and their 'mates' (I use this term because the majority of the subjects were pregnant or new mothers) were not faring well in my poems. So I think Darryl was turning the camera, which is to say, forcing me to think/write from the other point of view.

In terms of sequence, this image came right after the image that produced "Pond Scum," about a beauty queen that marries a frog prince.

So I began thinking about fairy tales and politics and Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, and so I came up with a list of helpful hints for any prince, real or imaginary (or both).