Stephen King: “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”

Me: “Some are more magical than others.”

Some books are all text, the images coming via words as a gift from the writer to the imagination of the reader.

Other books are also art objects, the words and images collectively becoming something more than the sum of the two, something magical. Libro Venado / Deer Book is one of those books.

Some pages are orange, some red, some other colors. Some are translucent. One accordians out in the hands of reader. Spanish text and English translations appear together on the pages and on the cover. Quantum physics and botany collaborate with cosmology and Indigenous spirituality. What looks like a tick with fourteen legs and seven eyes shares the page with a spiral around a dot, arrows rippling out in four directions. It includes the only description of photosynthesis that has ever made sense to me: “Wild little leaf, ship of lumen / Who told you to talk to the light?”

Nothing I write here will adequately convey the magical something of Libro Venado / Deer Book, but a few pages can be seen on the publisher’s website. (Scroll down for the video.)

Poetry, drawings and magic by Cecilia Vicuña.

Translation from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky.

Inspiration from Flower World Variations, poems by Jerome Rothenberg, drawings by Harold Cohen.

Recommendation from the poet Deborah Kelly. Thank you, dear friend.

What are the books, the poems, the art that stretch your imagination, your thinking, that influence what you write or the art you make, that sometimes keep you up at night? How did you find them?