Another example of Jaap Blonk’s abundant phantasy: 81 colourful and playful drawings, adding new dimensions to writing. Myriads of little beings populate each page, distant descendants of Blonk’s earlier phonetic signs.
Each possible garden is a harvest of sound and image, of script and performance, which asks the reader to be open to a new menu.

One element here is the depiction of a struggle between restriction and freedom as a reminder of the lockdown period when these were made: in each drawing some of the tiny beings are boxed, while many others roam freely.
Sometimes the images look like scientific illustrations from an unknown world, depicting mysterious interactions and behaviors. But always there is poetry in these protozoa as they squirm and swim though a microscopic linguistic field, ebbing and flowing, gathering and fracturing – a constant dance of interplay and restriction.

Stare gently at each possible garden Jaap Blonk has sown here until it begins to vibrate, layer by layer, lifting off the page, two dimensions shifting into three then four. Keep staring and the gardens and peopled landscapes and maps will move and grow and glow into and through and with your eyes… (Crag Hill, co-editor of The Last Vispo)

Softcover, published in 2022, 82 pages, 15×23 cm.

Published by Canadian writer, artist and scholar Derek Beaulieu’s Post-Asemic Press. (Asemic: no semantic meaning in the word sense, abstract, but with a rich and lively musical expression)