BRICKBRICKBRICK is background reading brought to the forefront.

With this new collection, poet Mark Laliberte presents a series of visual meditations on the subject of “ poetics." Like much of his recent output, this project hovers around—but never quite steps into—the cultural zone that pure, popular comics inhabit.

The hybrid “texts” presented in this volume (slowly developed from 2001-08), appropriate and invade the hand-made illustrative markings of different illustrators or cartoonists, as they draw bricks—usually in the backgrounds of city scenes. Each drawn source is pulled forward and stripped of all signs of their original narrative intent. In a process that is metaphorically connected to the careful manipulation of written words on a page, each work is digitally constructed—brick-by-brick—into new and distinct walls that the reader will likely enjoy hitting up against.