Campeche

Author: Joshua Edwards and Van Edwards

Photographer: Van Edwards

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2011)

Titled after pirate Jean Lafitte's name for Galveston Island, Campeche is a cautionary lyric composed of poems and photographs in which a real place is overlaid with the parable of a mythical world on the verge of an apocalyptic flood. Like the body fishermen of the Yellow River, this book combs water for remains and meditates on evidence, while attempting to reckon with the self as a troubled song within a greater song. "If the soul is a souvenir in human shape, / the sun is half its shadow and discloses / who is what when in public."