VIDEO ESSAYS AND CINEPOETRY
Genres of hybrid writing that combine artful text
with moving image, often in a very short form
They do this by letting writing and video footage take turns setting the tone, delivering the images, or playing the role of narrator. What we see across this genre are pieces of literature backed by footage that is more than a supercut, but less than a documentary. Or perhaps they’re videos driven by texts that are less than a voiceover, but more than a song lyric. Faster than a mood board, louder than a screensaver, the literary video is a genre that has long anticipated audiences who read long poems, call grandmothers, and binge TikTok all on the same screen.
OBSESSION || ISSUE NO.11 || Spring 2026
In “Not Included—Embedded” Troels Steenholdt Heiredal uses the accessible image description as a writing prompt. Dancers perform for their reflections in the storefront glass of Taipei, where the sidewalk is more restaurant than street. Silhouettes scatter through city parks, which “echo of the collective tending to the body.” Through “autistic perception,” a new vernacular of space spreads across the screen and Heiredal teaches the viewer, again, how to see.
In “signs of life” the speaker is grieving, pacing in her own interminable shadow, engraving the pavement with chicken bones. Shooting on an iPhone, Sloan Asakura writes: “And the omen, also lonely, croaks a song.” Her recycled lines remind us that each season is a form of insistence, a life reasserted by its shadow.
In their three-part collaboration, “Candidacy,” Ginger Ko and Katie Jean Shinkle wander through a funhouse where vaginas are made of H-E-B bags and women are fluent in intrusive thoughts. Simple props turn the actors into their own ventriloquists: “Why are you so focused on how he talks about you?” “It’s not his fault he likes skinny, pretty, sweet things.” The script descends into pearly wigs “trapped in ritual time, your Tupperware party, your onboarding training,” speaking through the fake beard of a hegemony fully internalized.
RENEWAL || ISSUE NO.10 || Fall 2025
“Instar” by Jessie Kraemer captures, in brief, the strange intimacy and ranging headspace of a three-hour phone call across footage so green it will make your bones ache for summer.
Diana Khoi Nguyen’s “Fathers and Daughters” shows us what the lyric essay borrows from the split screen—“Milk-straw in my mouth, my father just beside me.”—through a meditation on watching films and what home video can accidentally capture.
“one thing a thousand times” is the newest piece from poet and video maker Ryley O’Byrne, whose haunting combinations of text and screen-recording imagery will expand your sense of writing that is made to be experienced on (and also speak back to) a screen.
ACCESS || ISSUE NO.9 || Spring 2025
In “Diaspora Study Slide Projector,” Carolina Ebeid unfurls a family archive—“pictures from New Jersey, Baghdad, Florida, California”—to demonstrate the layers of time, language, and place that survive in the analog slide projector. This piece is interested in overlapping margins, in how the human figure, dressed in a white shirt, has the propensity to behave like a screen. Using text and projected image, Ebeid accesses both the “tongue mother” and “the mother tongue," overlaid in shades of surrender.
Richard Frailing’s “Flying Dreams” stages a conversation between an artist and a therapist who asks him encouraging questions, such as, “People fly in dreams for different reasons. Do you feel like you had to escape?” But the footage playing behind their dialogue evades answers as seamlessly as the artist does. The film reels capture women cutting cake, a man with a baby in his arms, while two voices consider the risks of inheriting scabs along with psychosis. “Flies don’t fly, they swim; the air to them is like syrup or sap,” muses the artist as documents of a personal history hover, paddling just out of reach.
Sophie Paquette’s “I Caught on Fire for This” is a video essay full of humor and longing. This is a project about deep time, inevitable crushes, and the paralysis of the internet age. Voiced impossibly by miniature porcelain figures, Paquette demonstrates once again her ability to draw both blood and tears by combining text and a set of deceptively simple visual elements.