"For The Birds" Chapbook was a design solution that Stephanie Gross and I came up with to display her writing during our solo exhibition at the Minor League gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. Because of the pandemic, we wanted to have something to present to our friends and family who couldn't make it to the show and give Stephanie's writing a meaningful form.

6 Pages

Laser Print Black and White

Rock Dove Press

Here is our statement for the exhibition

Mike and I started this project with a simple idea, or restriction, really. He wanted to take pictures with me as I went on birding walks during the migratory seasons in fall and spring and capture images via my gaze - the places, mainly in Prospect Park, where I spotted birds. He asked me to write poems for the project, and my initial writing was quite different: light and romantic, reveling in the intensity of our new relationship. The project changed as we did. Mike started doing work on his own, of the tree canopies and the sky, and my writing became more somber - focused on the role that memory plays in our daily lives. Memories are perpetual, ever-repeating, but they also become fragmented and can be repurposed over time. I also wanted to explore, and I do so in the last poem, how absence is a kind of presence, something I think we can all relate to in this exceptionally disruptive and strange year. -Stephanie

I designed the layout of this exhibition collaboratively with Stephanie and Alex Williams. We chose to print on newsprint specifically because of its fragility. The grid format represents the repetitive, cyclical nature of relationships. In the words of Jack Gilbert, love lasts by not lasting.

-Mike

Exhibition website: https://minorleague.us/eight

The Great Falls

For The Birds Chapbook by Michael Dalton and Stephanie Gross