Without Form
Published by The Blasted Tree & knife | fork | book
- August 2021
Since the mid-1500s, the text of the Holy Bible has been subdivided into chapters and verses. These markings are all we see in Ben Robinson’s Without Form, a meticulous erasure of the Bible sparing only its notation. The resultant text drifts like atomized numerical clouds across the mathematical superstructure of the divine, hinting at a supreme silence before the word. This ambitious project encompasses all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments combined—over seven hundred and fifty pages—co-published as a limited edition hardcover art book by The Blasted Tree and knife | fork | book.
Reviews & Interviews
…the form without the content is no dead thing, nothing meaningless, but rather a geography of constellated glyphs that add up to the possibility of imagining life.
Visual Poetry Through the Lens of the Long Poem: A Conversation
I number this text among those which render me, if not speechless, then counting its blessings.
Can I say I prefer the bible this way? How simple it renders the religious/spiritual endeavor: to seek not what is there, but what is not. Here is Stevens’ snow man, “the listener, who . . . beholds / Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.”
This unreadable and unknowable Word invites the reader not into the task of comprehension but into the space of reflection, not into an absolute void, but into the human attempt to allow the divine Word to appear.