Venti by JoAnne McKay

Venti is a beautiful handmade collection of poetry from JoAnne McKay who blogs over at Titus the Dog. Venti is such a lovely looking book that I seemed to keep picking it up just to look at it before I ever read it. The book includes wonderful images from Matt Kish and rubber stamped hare and seahorse illustrations. The book is made from a lovely cream paper and is printed with a very pleasing font and has a very attractive cover!

So when I'd finally admired all the elements of the book's appearance, I was able to sit down and read the poetry which is as lovely to read as the book is to look at! There's a lot of nature in this chapbook, from the symbolic Fleur de Lis to the fleeting life of Mayflies. We are shown a different take on the octopus in this excerpt from Octopodes:

When the previous cosmos collapsed
there was a sole survivor
of the wreckage, who squeezed
his form through tightest crack
into this our universe.

Also in the realm of strange sea creatures we have the seahorse in Hippocampus hippocampus:

fragile, flimsy-finned horse
fluttering in the sea grass
snuffling for shrimp.


This is a short book but one that the reader will return to again and again.

Venti handmade and published by JoAnne MacKay