Physical Poetry Alphabet: Starring Erika Lemay

This beautiful coffee table-sized hardcover book, Physical Poetry Alphabet, was produced and designed by Douglas and Françoise Kirkland and features model and aerialist Erika Lemay. Through obviously difficult acrobatic feat, the producers direct Lemay to imitate the letters of the alphabet from A to Z by her body poses and over backgrounds of carefully set physical elements. Brief text with each letter continues using the illustrated letters as starting letters of most of the words. The text continues throughout but it’s unexciting. Each photo is nice, pleasing and for each illustrated letter we find two. One is a detail of the main photograph. Some reproduce the model in mirror images (like for letter O). The writers call this volume a modern-day abecedarium. The first few pages introduce the history of language and alphabets, the letters dating back to some five-thousand years.

The volume ends with texts by Erika Lemay, element designer William Thoren, and producer Françoise Kirkland, explaining a little bit of the production. There are also some photos illustrating how this volume was photographed in the studio. This is an interesting book, yet after looking through it once or twice, most readers may not pick it up again.