2026 literary writing

7 7

7 7 — the pale linen cover, the title in red, a ball of red wool with its thread wandering across the cloth.

7 7 is an intimate portrait of my mother through the gestures that connect her to others: tending a courtyard, knitting for people across an ocean, playing music with her family. Across poems and corresponding images, it explores how a life and personality become recognisable through memory, habit and relationships.

The work asks machines to translate the poems and their visual themes into images, bringing a synthetic imagination into contact with a deeply personal subject.

A spread — a German poem facing a painting of a tulip bud, its green sheath splitting open to red. — nature (I)

A spread — a poem facing a cool, deep painting of open water, a lone swimmer heading out. — swimming (III)

The final spread — the red thread stitched through the gutter, wandering across two blank pages. — „für das, was noch kommt"

Made for my mother’s sixty-fifth birthday, on July 7. A single copy, with seven poems and seven images. I wrote or reworked the poems; machines generated the images and design. Photographs of the book by my mother.

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