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After is about the life of the book in the digital age and the transitory nature of all things. It is structured into two sections. The first section features photos of ghostly afterimages left behind on the glassine sheets protecting plates in a 1929 art history catalog. The real world intrudes at the end of the first section when a thumb appears in the image. As the reader flips to the second side of the dos-a-dos, the imagery pivots to include afterimages of different kinds from the outside world. The text in the book is a blackout poem using a sequence of poems by 15th-century Japanese Zen monk Ikkyu as the source text. The original sequence - titled Skeletons - is an extended exploration of the same transitory theme as After.

"I [the editor] wanted to explore these issues around freedom of expression by putting side-by-side the issue of censorship in Vietnam, the significance of banning the n-word in America, and what it means to take out words or not say words in general to create space ..."--Editor's introduction

Part memoir, part treatise, part collage and experiment, Krista Franklin's Under the Knife is an excavation; a dig at the sites of the construction and demolition of the poet/artist's selves. Franklin plays fast and loose with fact at the crossroads of the history of her maternal line and her own in a ruptured conversation about inheritance and the generational traumas that blossom in the body. Under the Knife hiccups, cross-fades and stops midsentence as Franklin cuts through the illusion of memory, the pathologies of history, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

"In White gaze, artist and filmmaker Michelle Dizon works with an archive of National Geographic magazines to explore the mechanics of the 'white gaze.' Through a process of poetic subtraction, Dizon works with only the language on the original page to write a decolonial counterpoint to a way of imaging the world centered on the West. Her images lay the white gaze bare, unearth a genealogy of a racist visuality, and work in the gap between image and text to write against the grain of imperialist narratives. Artist and writer Việt Lê uses Dizon's images from White gaze as a starting point for his poetic exploration of the legacies of war and imperialism. Lê's text performs a dual work, both contextualizing Dizon's images in the history of empire and unleashing a rhythmic play with language, both visually and aurally, to cut to the core of how meaning is produced. His text speaks to absence as much as presence with a story of war and empire told in fragments, phrases, words hanging on the page--an index of both the trauma and resistance experienced by those subjected to the violence of empire"--Bookmark insert.