ciprian honey cathedral by Raymond Meeks. Published by Mack.
If 2020 was a shit year, its grace is that a book came along and set down into the deep acequias of my brain. ciprian honey cathedral. This book reminds me of temporality, the spell of what’s daily and habitual, and that the essence of our lives is something accrued from those who we spend our time with, family. The experience of this book is tranquil, soft, diffuse, and intimate – it is the stuff from which we say of a Monday that we had a ‘good’ weekend, and mean it; that muted & abstract & routine minutia from which poetry is made, and Meeks has made a visual poetry through this work without any need for words, and having dealt in words too often, I won’t diminish his book by trying to describe the images within – I will simply say that the book is true & self-evident & worth the time of anyone who endeavors to love their loved ones, and who is not afraid to share what that love looks and feels like.
Honorable Mentions:
The Living Mountain by Awoiska Van Der Molen
Aya by Yann Gross & Arguiñe Escandón
Christopher J Johnson is the co-author of Meow Wolf's House of Eternal Return storyline and the recipient of The Mountains West Poetry Series first book publication prize (2016). He has written on photobooks since 2012, and has been a bookseller since 2008. He is currently manager of photo-eye Bookstore.