Thirty-five ekphrastic poems pair with images of artist Kristy Deetz's "Specimens" (environmental sculptures) made with encaustic, found objects, and natural materials. E. S. Louis’s poems respond in content and style to the sculptures and offer the reader ways to enter the artwork while adding nuanced layers of allusion and metaphor.

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Introduction

“The most important factor in surviving is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.”

--Charles Darwin

Kristy Deetz’s sculptural series Specimens comprises three-dimensional paintings constructed from natural materials, “found objects” (non-euphemistically, trash items), and encaustic paint. They present thought experiments set in a post-apocalyptic world where evolution continues, but on a different course than in our current environment. The metamorphic creatures persist amidst a world of climate change, toxic incursions, and competition for livable habitats, yet the environment itself retains layers of phenomenal activity and even beauty. Because of the raw, immediate, and fragile nature of the sculptures, some of the physical objects no longer exist in the form you see here. Some are on display at shows in galleries. All continue as electronically available digital photos on the website: www.kristydeetz.com.

 A series of ekphrastic poems by E. S. Louis accompany the art pieces online as well as in this book. They represent not definitive exegeses of the art works, but verbal commentaries (or partial reconstructions) aimed to provide entryways into interpretation and enjoyment of the art. Readers may see them as incantatory relics or as either serious or humorous dialogue within and among the sculptures; they aim to provide another layer of liveliness and activity on the edges of the “worlds of the text,” the imaginative spaces in and from which the artworks have evolved and continue to do so.

 To paraphrase Shakespeare from the Epilogue to The Tempest, our project was to please—though we also hope to engage in the bigger dialogue that considers the health and longevity of the facets, living and nonliving, of our stress-beset Earth. Thank you for engaging with our work.

--the artist and the writer, April 2026