The Shape of Losing Light
A Verse Novel

About this book:

Maeve has spent forty-two years coaxing truth from lead and linen—every poem a architecture of picas and points, every broadside a wall built against the dark. Now the master printer's own eyes are betraying her geometry: horizon lines buckle, letters lean into phantom gravity, the clean white field of the page shivers with a distortion no loupe can correct. In a voice as precise as the Vandercook press she tends, she documents the slow surrender of the tool that made her work possible, discovering that the scotoma eating her central vision mirrors the very principles she's spent a lifetime mastering—kerning, leading, the tension between mark and margin, the shape of what's left when the center fails.

*The Shape of Losing Light* is a verse novel of rare physical intelligence, where typography and ophthalmology speak the same language of alignment and loss. Each chapter bears a term from both crafts—*Kerning the Horizon*, *The Amsler Distortion*, *Braille as Architecture*—as Maeve navigates a workshop that still smells of mineral spirits and gum arabic, a bookseller friend who measures friendship in cheddar and pilot crackers, and the cold Atlantic light that once sharpened every serif. Here the sentence is a physical object you can weigh in your hand, and blindness arrives not as metaphor but as a compositor's error: a single point off, a hairline fracture in the chase, the press still running perfect impressions while the reader's own eye goes pied.

What remains when the proofreader can no longer trust the proof? This is a book for anyone who has ever loved a craft enough to watch it become impossible—about the stubborn dignity of showing up at the composing stone anyway, setting *ERROR* in thirty-six-point Gill Sans because the hand remembers what the eye forgets, and learning to read the world again through its peripheries, where the light still holds its edges.