The Velvet Crossing

Thirty-three poems, written as a teenager and registered with the Copyright Office in 2023. They are on this site individually, and collected here as the book they belong to.

The book opens:

The ocean seems very static
Just some waves traversing
But deep within its very erratic
No one knows what's occurring

And it closes:

I still with dismay, ask myself the same
What if all this happens again?
What if I am travelling in a loops disclaim?
Eternally repeating just the same

About this edition

The book is set in LaTeX from the original manuscript, a Word document filed as the copyright deposit copy. That deposit is the authoritative text, and the setting was checked against it line by line: all 33 titles and all 799 verse lines match exactly.

Three lines that the export had soft-wrapped were rejoined into the single lines they were written as, and eight titles were regularised to consistent title case. No word was changed anywhere. Punctuation, spelling and the running order are the manuscript's.

The trim is A5, 148 × 210 mm, set in memoir in TeX Gyre Pagella at 11 pt. Each poem's verse block is optically centred on its own longest line, a page may turn only between stanzas, and a tailpiece is never carried onto a page of its own.

The cover and the thirty-three tailpieces are drawn as vector instructions rather than imported, so there is no image file anywhere in the book — nothing on the page carries a licence or an attribution of its own, and the whole thing compiles from text.

Contents

About this edition