Praise from Tom Rankin



A collaboration across and between images and words, White Fence is a transporting work whose form bears vivid witness to the resonance of the photographic image to elicit narrative and associations in abundance.

Built around ten compelling photographs by Paula Siwek, these four poets and their imagery create a magical confluence of ideas, geographies, personal landscapes, and, of course, many more images through artful verse.

What might ten photographs begat if handed to a group of poets, one might ask. White Fence is a singularly beautiful answer by poets Basting, Deblinger, Hedgepeth, and Metge, delivering a book that can be ingested as a collage of the imagination, but also wonderfully through the individual vision, luminance, and lyricism of each of the artists.

-TOM RANKIN Photographer. Writer. Professor of the Practice of Art, Art History & Visual Studies and Director of the Duke MFA Program in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University