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.

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.