Visual Verse is a neat online journal exclusively featuring ekphrastic poems and stories. Every month, they post a new image prompt and a challenge to submit a single 50-500 word response to it, written in no more than an hour.

This month, the image is a picture by poet Sarah-Jane Crowson, who is an internet-acquaintance of mine and creates surreal and dreamy visual poetry. I was very pleased that my response poem “Preservation” was one of those chosen for publication in this volume.

The poem is a “duplex” poem, a relatively recent form premiered by poet Jericho Brown. It’s constructed with a series of interlinked and repeating couplets, ending up something like a cross between a ghazal and a sonnet. I’ll be writing more of these.