An astonishing series of unique collaborative image-text projects, Sentenced to Light privileges its poetic and formal textual space outside most of the images that are its original twins and offers the reader a glimpse of the dialectic of larger conversations, the unpredictable, improvisatory bavardage that whispers between words and pictures in a space we call culture.

“Anecdotal Waters” is an invited response to a mixed-media installation by Mireille Perron and Paul Woodrow. “Articulations” was printed on a series of fifty paintings by Calgary artist Bev Tosh and incorporated in both an installation and a performance of the work. “All Americans” was serialized for an installation on the Minnesota Massacre of 1862. A biotext of landscape and memory, “Twain” consists of textual improvisations provoked by and situated alongside six poems that artist Marian Penner Bancroft applied directly to the walls among the photographs in her exhibition “By Land and Sea (Prospect and Refuge).” The alphabet of “jingo cards” was written for a collaborative performance piece with Vancouver multi-media artist Haruko Okano called “High Bridi Tea” that gestated years later into her jargon art project “Homing Pidgin.” “Pop Goes the Hood,” was written for a video-text performance commissioned from video artist Henry Tsang and poet Fred Wah. “Me Too” pays ghostly homage to the visual and textual work of Roy Kiyooka. The two “transcreations” are part of photographer Ernie Kroeger’s “Wild Writing” project that uses his photographically treated rubbings of the glyphs left by the Mountain Pine Beetle.

The series of ppretences (prose-poem sentences) was written for “Pays Maya,” a show of photographer Richard Baillergeon’s Yucatan images. In the title section, the prose-poem sentences stretch to comprehend the vanishing edges of lens, eye and syntax within Mexican photographer Eric Jervaise’s black-and-white photos, made with his hand-built panoramic view camera.

Born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan in 1939, celebrated Canadian poet Fred Wah was raised in the interior of British Columbia. He is the author of over 20 published works of poetry and prose-poetry, including the award-winning creative non-fiction Diamond Grill, the tenth anniversary edition of which was released in the fall of 2006. Other notable titles by Wah include his book of poetry Waiting For Saskatchewan (Turnstone Press), winner of a Governor General’s Award in 1985, and Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Writing in Canadian literature. In 2008, he published a collection of poetic image/text projects titled Sentenced to Light (Talonbooks), and in 2010, he won the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize for poetry for is a door (Talonbooks).Fred Wah was one of the founding editors of the poetry journal TISH. After graduate work in literature and linguistics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the State University of New York in Buffalo, where he worked with Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, he returned to Canada. He has been involved in teaching internationally in poetry and poetics since the early 1960s. In 2011, Wah became Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate, the fifth poet to do so. In 2013, he was made an Officer in the Order of Canada. Fred Wah currently works and lives in Vancouver.

Fred Wah's profile page

• Short-listed, ReLit Award for Poetry