Aperture: Poems for Josef Sudek is a chapbook written in response to neo-romantic photographer Josef Sudek (1896-1976) who captured the beauty of Prague, interiors, still lifes, and Bohemian forests in black-and-white. Twelve photographs are reproduced with permission from the Art Gallery of Ontario. The cover is letterpress printed on handmade paper, and the interior photographs and text are printed offset on bright white paper. Hand-sewn with black thread in a limited edition of 125.

¶ She gently turns over an event, an idea, a piece of art or a word in her hand like you would an apple, to admire its beauty, to anticipate its taste, to follow its poetic possibilities. — Al Rempel, ARC

In Ruth Roach Pierson's own words...

¶ I have only what I remember, Merwin writes, resigned not to a dearth but an omnium-gatherum of memories—whether amorphous and unloosed from time or firmly grounded and undimmed as though he’s again playing, in the re-entered past, the protagonist in the theatre of life. From time to time mine ambush me as I walk down the street in full daylight. Some delight, others devastate, breaking through the frozen crust to re-inflame buried pain. Still others flit past my inner eye like short-lived visual migraines. […] Outside there were explosions in the night sky, fireworks in celebration of a Russian holiday, the face of a czar shattering into icy glitter. And all the while the woman from next door was setting out, onto her front porch as on a stage, three bottles of pink-tinted water. — March 2015, LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA