The Library, by David Schulz. Light Rail Works, 112 pages, Digital printing, Perfect bound, 9 x 12”, edition of 100, 2019.

To purchase, please email davidschulzworks at gmail dot com. $50.

The Library is a meditation on realization and loss through the practice of reading. After his father’s unexpected death, the author searched for him in selected books from his father’s library in an attempt to access and preserve his (and his father’s) memories and thoughts as well as to give shape to questions about a disturbing past.
A fugue-structure assembles photographs of books from his father’s library alongside the author’s prose-poems which respond to his reading of those books. As photographs of books bear witness to the objects with which the father had physical contact, the texts emanating from those objects imagine representations of his thoughts as he read. Photo-collages of forests represent the visual thoughts of the author as he attempted to read his own father, who was often obscured by the enigmas of despair and anxiety.
The multiple voices and narrative perspectives encountered in the books from the library expose a series of formative events within and surrounding the father’s life. They also inspire the author to create an imagined history in the resulting prose-poems.
The culminating book—a portrait in absentia—creates a parallel reality to his father, one that masks actual memories and obstructs his father’s voice as it probes the space between documentation and invention, and between the imperative to understand and the impossibility of knowing.
Below: Double-paged spreads from The Library.