Ode to Children Raised on Florida Tap Water
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In 4.23, an all-poetry issue, Linda Parsons celebrates the way life keeps moving forward in four poems beginning with “Pilgrimage.” P. Scott Cunningham embraces the beauty of the Sunshine State in three poems beginning with “Ode to Children Raised on Florida Tap Water.” And Elaine Sexton asks “What could be more beautiful than this?” in four poems beginning with “The Meaning of Screens.” These poems are in her fifth collection, Site Specific: New & Selected, (forthcoming Grid Books, May 2025.)
This issue features albumen silver prints of geometric designs created on “the hand or foot lathe” from Specimens of Fancy Turning (1869) by Edward J. Woolsey.
This early photography book, titled Specimens of Fancy Turning, features thirty tipped-in albumen silver prints of geometric designs created on “the hand or foot lathe”. Resembling something between spirograph drawings and textbook diagrams of orbiting electrons, the figures were created using geometric, oval, and eccentric chucks and an elliptical cutting frame. Attributed to “an amateur” on its title page, the book is the work of Edward J. Woolsey (1803–1872), an heir of the mercantile Woolsey family and partner in the New York Patent Sugar Refinery. From Public Domain Review.
