Bored by the slick disposability of ebooks and deletable pdfs, I've spent the last seven years getting intimate with the print artifact, haunting libraries of various sorts, writing essays in response to things I found there (a bookplate, a forgotten sentence, a human hair, a found text, homophobic marginalia, an overheard conversation) and publishing them back into the books/libraries where they originated. Libraries change but readers don't. We come to books for solace, for information, to better understand ourselves and our worlds. We come for mothering, for othering, for that fluttering feeling we get when we read a sentence that rings and rings and rings in us forever. We swallow it, that sentence, those rings, and then it's in us, and then someday we will sing it out again. I believe in the library--and the book--as a medium of communication.

I wrote all these essays and published them back on 6x9 cards into the books and libraries where they began.

These letters to a future lover, these letters to lovers of the future (and of the future of the book) are collected in this book.

It's as much a book as a record of practice. Though the book is out there, I continue writing essays as I visit libraries and thinking and finding echoes to my questions; the only way to get one of these these extra essays is to come to a reading.

What do you take from books? How do you care for them--or deface them? What do you leave behind?

Let me know. Email me & send me a copy or just a description of what you've found.