Robbi Nester is the author of five books of poetry, with many poems published individually in online and print journals. She has also edited three anthologies, including Over the Moon, a collection of poems about the works of photographer Beth Moon; and The Plague Papers, a singular collection of poems about exhibits in virtual museums, to serve as respite and adventure for readers sheltering in place during the Pandemic. So, Nester is no stranger to ekphrastic poetry.

Shanti Arts (14 OCT 2025)

Traditionally, ekphrastic poetry responds to visual art. This response can take many forms. Nester moves past the classic ekphrastic response—the description, the interpretation—to use the image as a point of departure rather than a destination.

In her latest collection of ekphrastic poems, About to Disappear, the image is never the goal. The poet begins with the image, but she quickly steps through the frame, using the artwork as a portal, moving through the mirror, letting form, colour, and theme lead her in new directions. The images become an invitation to allowing the poetic mind to wander, a prompt to kick off the creative process rather than accepting them as boundaries that need to be obeyed, making Nester’s worlds beyond the image as important as the point of departure: an artwork with its own weight.

Nester’s poems are tightly crafted, elegant, and use a language of precision and imagination: there is no superfluous word; every space is deliberate. What began as an image spawns speculation and wonder. Nester’s natural curiosity takes us on a generous journey of her imaginative territory. She inhabits each piece before interpreting it, leaving us to experience the image through her eyes, then to follow the poetic road on which she takes us.

The collection has an urgent vitality; it’s difficult to stop and let it simmer. In its own way, About to Disappear is a page turner, but one you want to begin again the moment you finish—to find all the hidden meanings, thoughtful lines, exciting new directions you missed the first time around. And, yes, it yields and offers more each time.

Nester doesn’t ask the artworks to explain themselves, to take on the burden of the narrative, but seems to let them flow through her, dissolving each one until she reassembles them, taking them into a new, poetic landscape, letting the reader experience what she sees and feels, and insisting on her own imaginative autonomy.

Nester’s About to Disappear is liberated ekphrasis, transformation rather than transcription. It invites us to follow her vision, her voice. Each poem is a small act of defiance by transmuting the visual into language and giving the reader the gift of a new way of seeing.

Rose Mary Boehm

is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and the author of two novels as well as nine poetry collections and a chapbook. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print), and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her most recent collections are available on Amazon, including four from Kelsay Books: The Matter of Words (2025), Life Stuff (2023), Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders? (2022), and Saudade (2022); as well as Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit, 2022). Her latest full-length collection is looking for a publisher.

Author’s website: https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Sirens to Larks: Interview with Poet Rose Mary Boehm by Luanne Castle in Poetry and Other Words (9 June 2025)

⚡ The Ashes of Ukraine, a haibun by Boehm in Issue 18 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (April 2023): nominated for the Red Moon Anthologies and selected for reprinting in Contemporary Haibun 19

⚡ A Conversation with Poet Rose Mary Boehm by Kathleen Cassen Mickelson in One Minnesota Crone (March 2024)

⚡ Kleidung wider den Tod zu Rom, Anno 1656 (“Clothing against death in Rome in the year 1656”), an ekphrastic poem by Boehm in Issue 16 of MacQ (January 2023)

⚡ Seven prose poems by Rose Mary Boehm in The Mackinaw (14 July 2025)

⚡ Magic Names, or All That We’re About to Lose by Boehm in Issue 23 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (April 2024)