Lights Under Concrete and Glass
Lights Under Concrete and Glass is a collection of prose poetry that explores the twenties of a cultural historian, pragmatic insomniac, and capital-R Romantic through splintered Vancouver nights.
The pieces, in their variety, connect into a cultural ecology: a stack of blurry photographs that remember places and people at a certain time in a certain place, with their connections and proclivities.
Read the Substack Introduction post here.
203 PAGES
Absence Under the Electrics
Absence Under the Electrics (2022) is a collaborative text between poet Violetta Leigh and analog photographer Yannick Pereira Bajard. It started as a project during the pandemic, as a way for two friends to connect, create, distract, and move forward.
The majority of Leigh’s poems are odes to gestural moments of human intimacy – ‘borrowing’ a drag of someone’s cigarette, holding hands in a cab – lost during a period of turning away, as we distanced to keep each other safe. There is a four line stanza to represent each month of the pandemic, from March 2020 to the time of publication.
Pereira Bajard’s photographs document urban centres empty of their people. Often at night, the photographs depict barren geography: emerald halogen limning the linear planes of a concrete parking garage, flash outlines four empty chairs abandoned outside of an industrial building, and streetlights illuminate empty sidewalks, glowing golden for no one.
44 pages
ON ORDER
Heartworm Reader Vol. 1 // Heartworm Press
The transition from guttered streetlight to dim venue startled her eyes, and for two breaths, three breaths, the passage rendered her sightless. Every cracked soul shrouded in leather that stepped through that doorway placed themselves in vulnerability while their body adjusted to a lightless, roaring chamber.
The Black Editions #2 Night Paces by Violetta Leigh // Black Flowers Press
Hip-to-ceiling windows measure her in desaturated doubles, a city ghost that haunts herself in neon exhales.
Memory Wood // Vulnerary Magazine
On the last day of the month, we prowled the alleys of East Van
from Main to Nanaimo for relics abandoned by movers eddied
by a fraught clock who discarded their belongings too cumbersome
to load into the box of a truck. Sometimes, it wasn’t worth the hassle –
I understood, having compartmentalized my life into a suitcase
for years //