Dante called the most beautiful things of this world the visible parlare- the visible speaking- that comes not from our hands but God’s. The surprise gift of a camera during Covid lock-down casts Kathryn Winograd into a journey through the intersections between written and visual image. Mourning what feels like the broken world, she moves between the quaking aspen of her Teller County cabin and the South Platte River near her suburban home in search of the beautiful things of this world that might speak to us: the imprint of a dead flicker, the shell of a moon snail on a window sill, or taking a puppy outside at 3 a.m. to pee and contemplating the universe. In this hybrid collection of photopoetry and prose vignettes, Winograd weaves together images of the Colorado she loves, whether wandering bull elks or cabbage white butterflies. The beautiful images in This Visible Speaking give rise to lyrical meditations on love and loss and beauty and on the voices of those early explorers of the daguerreotype and the photograph who, dazzled and wary, learned to fix the world in light.
Table of Content
This Visible Speaking: An Introduction XI
By Robert Root
Preface XIII
1. Unlocking the Camera 1
2. Shooting a Snowy Egret at Blackrock Lake 5
3. On Beauty and Finding a Dead Flicker 9
4. Owl Head at Beaver Creek 13
5. Photographing the Wild Geranium 17
6. Widow Skimmer at Ladybug Lake 21
7. Moth Orchid at the Botanical Gardens 25
8. After Reading W. Henry Fox Talbot’s Account 29
8. Of How ‘Natural Objects Can Be Made to Delineate Themselves Without the Aid of the
Artist’s Pencil’
9. Our Rock Blossom Blooms 33
10. 3 a.m. and Taking the Puppy for a Pee Beneath a New Moon 37
11. Finding a Paper Wasp Nest Hanging Below a Porch Beam 41
12. Scrawled Cow(sh Found on a Childhood Beach 45
13. Two Owls Dip Down from a Ponderosa Pine 49
14 Histogram of the Fox in My Backyard 53
15. Drawing with Light 57
15. On the anniversary of my mother’s death
16. Late Summer Wasps 61
16. )And Not Bees����
17. Sweeping Dead Moths from a Window Screen 65
18. Western Painted Turtles Sunning 69
18. On the Submerged Tree my friend Called Holy
19. Photographing a Cabbage White Butter����y 73
19. at Castlewood Canyon
20. Catching Light 77
Study Guide 81
Acknowledgments 83
About the Author 85
Endnotes
About the author
Kathryn Winograd is a Colorado poet, essayist, and photographer. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver . Her poetry has been published in places as disparate from each other as The New Yorker and Cricket Magazine for Kids. Her first book of poetry, Air Into Breath, won the Colorado Book Award in Poetry. She has published two collections of essays, including Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which was awarded a Bronze Meadow in Essay for the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her photography has been published as cover photographs for literary journals, online essays and poems and shown as part of the Passionate Spectator Exhibit. Winograd has taught poetry and creative nonfiction for the Regis Mile-Hi and Ashland University Low Residency MFA programs.
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