Barry Sheinkopf has been writing poetry, as well as novels and nonfiction, for decades. In the early 1970s, his poems began to contain fewer and fewer words. He was producing tanka and haiku, and not being pleased with the results, when finally it dawned on him that he really wanted to make poems with no words at all. This, for a writer, is something of a dilemma. He tried to resolve it by picking up the first of a series of cameras, in 35-millimeter and 4x5" formats, and attempting to photograph the metaphors he saw all around him. His goal from the first has been to capture these exceptional moments in the life around him. If you know that you're looking at a photograph, he says-something that you know is real-but can't momentarily identify it, your sense of the world will be enlarged a little when you suddenly realize what it is and exclaim, "Aha " This book, then, records a quest for ways of apprehending the visual world that has never ended for him-of seeing into the life of forms, to help his viewers grasp that there are metaphors in everyday experience. Barry Sheinkopf's photographs have appeared in shows across the northeast United States.

April 1794: The Reign of Terror has been striking France like a plague for half a year. Daily, hundreds have followed King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the guillotine-some guilty of real crimes, some completely innocent. George-Jacques Danton has just met his own end in a poignant tableau captured for posterity on the cover of this book. His friend Joseph Fouche returns to Paris on the very next day, determined to avoid his own execution. How he does so-and manages to thereby end the Terror by overthrowing the government of the maniacal Maximilian Robespierre-is the subject of this first-person period mystery. It is a tale of terror and trickery, political struggle and sexual intrigue, involving Fouche's tenacious search for the murderer of Charles-Maurice Talleyrand's alluring, seventeen-year-old niece and his mistress's efforts to inherit a fabulous chateau-against the backdrop of our hero's audacious three-month effort to save his own neck.

When he won the New York City Barton's Bonbonniere Passover Poetry Contest at the age of fourteen, Barry Sheinkopf's prize was a five-pound box of chocolates. He had a bad case of acne at the time and likes to say his career as a poet has gone downhill ever since. But he has continued to produce poems in a wide range of styes in the intervening decades, taking up technical challenges ranging from making traditional stanza and verse forms sound like free verse, in his first two selected volumes, to his latest work, which attempts to capture the rhythms and absence of punctuation characteristic of email.