Leonard Neufeld

DEDICATION

FERVENT LOVE FRAMED WITH DEATH

CREMATION (HER BODY REDUCED TO ASHES)

KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF

I HAVEN’T CRIED I INTEND TO CRY BUT I HAVEN’T CRIED

REGENERATION DEGENERATION

THEY TOLD HER SHE’D HAD A STROKE

INCREMENTS OF THEN

POOR WOMAN WHAT A HORRIBLE BUSINESS
(FROM DIAGNOSIS TO DEATH)

PINWHEELS OF DEATH AND SOLITUDE

A GREAT SADNESS OVERWHELMS ME

IF I CAN’T HAVE THAT

AS IF YOU WERE WITHDRAWING FROM ME

PILLOW TALK

SCORPIO AND SAGITTARIUS
STUNG WITH STINGS AND SHOT WITH ARROWS

UNSURPASSABLE BEAUTY

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I composed each of these pieces in a template in Microsoft Word, a table of twenty-five columns and thirty-three rows of square cells. The typeface I’ve used is Courier New, because all the characters are the same width, ensuring exact vertical alignments.

Typically (but not always), a phrase will come to me and I’ll decide to build a piece around it by filling cells in the table with single characters, usually starting with the word or phrase going left to right or up to down. Often, I’ll look for ways of hooking words/phrases together based on shared characters, like a crossword. But some pieces don’t involve this kind of hooking together, and some pieces have words/phrases going right to left or down to up or diagonally.

If the finished piece doesn’t occupy the whole table, I’ll delete any empty rows and columns and then, as a last step, make the grid lines invisible.