Inherent

“One of the most meticulous concrete poets of our moment, Kevin Stebner, with his new book Inherent, revivifies the topography of typographic poetics, giving it a bold new visage. With a designer’s discernment and a poet’s heart, Stebner attunes himself to the murmurs of each typeface, liberating each and every one from language’s limits to vibrate in constellations of their own truth and beauty.”—Eric Schmaltz, author of Surfaces

“The poem-texts in Inherent explore/exploit the territory between glyph and word, letter and semantic value, demonstrating the power of the subatomic level of language in its capacity to act provocatively through the eye to mind with resonant sound-sense. The typographic richness of unusual fonts positioned dynamically on the page is a great reminder of how much freedom there was in dry lettering (aka Letraset) technology. Every move, every placement, was a deliberate act contributing to the construction of a text. These works shimmer, shake, and vibrate with excitement in an architectonic zone of imaginative composition.”—Johanna Drucker, author of Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present

“This is work of virtuoso beauty made by a master spinner of signs: crystalline, multi-faceted kaleidoscopic letterforms, mazes, roadmaps, blueprints, mandalas, I-think-knots, sometimes playful, sometimes numinous, alien, human, tactile with craquelure, synaptic as neural networks, lyrical, jazzy, magical, elegant. Stebner’s eyemusic made with dry transfer typefaces shows that letters are the ultimate building set as he sings infinite signifiers, sigils, and symmetrical signals. The endless sighs and size of the designs insightfully show that language is the most fun one can have looking at thinking and thinking about looking.”—Gary Barwin, author of For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems

“Kevin Stebner’s Inherent is a bold library of shape-shifting concrete poems. Every page reveals a typographical surprise. Stebner’s language becomes a material entity that marches its way through as the book progresses: letters dance, huddle and disperse, and point to the visual charm of language itself. This is a must for Letraset lovers and everyone interested in visual play!”—Astra Papachristodoulou, author of Constellations