Inherent

Longlisted for the 2025 Nelson Ball Prize Typography broken down into its most basic (and beautiful) forms to reveal the inherent voice within each shape. Inherent is a collection of concrete poems that uses poetic tools to reduce words and letters and characters to their structural components, celebrating the shapes we're used to taking for granted. Produced by physically scraping each letter onto the page using Letraset sheets-a process of tangible transference that requires irrevocable choice-this is a poetry of format that plays with aspects of form and design to demonstrate each typeface's individual poetic stance. Sitting somewhere between Hanjorg Mayer's Futura and Johanna Drucker's concrete poetics, with a hint of punk DIY zine culture and a heavy study of typographic graphic design, Inherent moves with palindromic rotational symmetry, arrays of potential landscapes, and alien languages where the Roman alphabet goes supernova into brilliant new forms. "These works shimmer, shake, and vibrate with excitement."-Johanna Drucker, author of Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Presentand Diagrammatic Writing

About the Author :
Kevin Stebner is an artist, poet and musician. He produces visual art using old videogame gear, and produces music and soundtracking with his chiptune project GreyScreen, post-hardcore in his band Fulfilment, as well as alt-country in the band Cold Water. Stebner has published a number of typewriter visual poems and other concrete work in chapbooks. He is also the proprietor of Calgary's best bookstore that's in a shed, Shed Books. Stebner lives in Calgary, Alberta.

Review :
"There’s something ancient in these forms, something complex and yet basic in an understand of how letters begin, evolve and continue. This is a fascinating exploration of shape."—rob mclennan “One of the most meticulous concrete poets of our moment, Kevin Stebner, with his new book Inherent, revivifies the topography of typographic poetics, giving it a bold new visage. With a designer’s discernment and a poet’s heart, Stebner attunes himself to the murmurs of each typeface, liberating each and every one from language’s limits to vibrate in constellations of their own truth and beauty.”—Eric Schmaltz, author of Surfaces “The poem-texts in Inherent explore/exploit the territory between glyph and word, letter and semantic value, demonstrating the power of the subatomic level of language in its capacity to act provocatively through the eye to mind with resonant sound-sense. The typographic richness of unusual fonts positioned dynamically on the page is a great reminder of how much freedom there was in dry lettering (aka Letraset) technology. Every move, every placement, was a deliberate act contributing to the construction of a text. These works shimmer, shake, and vibrate with excitement in an architectonic zone of imaginative composition.”—Johanna Drucker, author of Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present “This is work of virtuoso beauty made by a master spinner of signs: crystalline, multi-faceted kaleidoscopic letterforms, mazes, roadmaps, blueprints, mandalas, I-think-knots, sometimes playful, sometimes numinous, alien, human, tactile with craquelure, synaptic as neural networks, lyrical, jazzy, magical, elegant. Stebner’s eyemusic made with dry transfer typefaces shows that letters are the ultimate building set as he sings infinite signifiers, sigils, and symmetrical signals. The endless sighs and size of the designs insightfully show that language is the most fun one can have looking at thinking and thinking about looking.”—Gary Barwin, author of For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems “Kevin Stebner’s Inherent is a bold library of shape-shifting concrete poems. Every page reveals a typographical surprise. Stebner’s language becomes a material entity that marches its way through as the book progresses: letters dance, huddle and disperse, and point to the visual charm of language itself. This is a must for Letraset lovers and everyone interested in visual play!”—Astra Papachristodoulou, author of Constellations