About the Author

ANDREW SEGUIN is a poet and photographer. He is the author of two chapbooks, Black Anecdote and NN, and his poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including A Public Space, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, and Iowa Review. His work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, and Poets House. Andrew lives in New York City.

Reviews

"Andrew Seguin's The Room in Which I Work is a remarkably well-executed lyric meditation on the histories, the mechanics, and the poetics of photography, from Niépce's early experiments with "enabling, or allowing, an image...to paint itself on metal inside a camera obscura" up to the poet's own flâneur-like wanderings through space and time: "I carry a camera, which is to say I carry a question: what should I photograph?" While many of the poems approximate Niépce's aim to "copy Nature with the greatest fidelity," throughout the book Seguin hints at the limits of the photographic medium, often by surpassing them in flashes of pure poetic vision: "the rainbow felt forged / by gods playing horseshoes"; "Off went the crow who had ended // the sentence of the power lines." Lucid, personal, intelligent, moving, formally astute and supplemented with Seguin's hauntingly playful cyanotypes, The Room in Which I Work is like no other recent book I can think of, and among the most sophisticated and mature debuts in years."--Timothy Donnelly, author of The Cloud Corporation "Publishers Weekly" (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)

"Evoking the life of Nicéphore Niépce, a pioneer of photography, Seguin explores how photography has provided lasting metaphors for how we think, write, and talk about what we see."-- "Publishers Weekly" (1/1/2016 12:00:00 AM)

"As a whole, Andrew Seguin's The Room in Which I Work, is not only an essential historical account of the development of photography but also provides a generous and significant portrait of photography's astounding inventor."--Sonja James "Journal News" (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)

"Andrew Seguin has exposed the key elements of photography--light and time--and deftly captured their intersection with poetry. He frames his words with captivating original photographs that harken back to the inception of the medium and one of its inventors. This is a stunning and beautifully sequenced work that will appeal to lovers of words and pictures alike."--Dan Leers, Curator of Photography, Carnegie Museum of Art "Publishers Weekly" (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)