Author's Note:  I first discovered poetry comics when I inventoried Kenneth Koch’s papers for the New York Public Library in 1995. Koch had done hundreds of poetry comics, some of which were later published in The Art of the Possible (Soft Skull, 2004). I loved the idea of these "comics mainly without pictures," as Koch described them, and made a few of my own. Other influences include Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic (Macmillan, 1896), David Shrigley, Maira Kalman, Lynda Barry, and the McSweeney's anthology More Things Like This (Chronicle Books, 2009).


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Jessy Randall's poems, comics, and other things have appeared in Poetry, McSweeney's, and The Best American Experimental Writing. Her book Suicide Hotline Hold Music (Red Hen, 2016) is a collection of poems and comics. In the fall of 2018, Pleiades Press will publish How to Tell If You Are Human, a collection of diagram poems made from illustrations in old library books. She is a librarian at Colorado College and her website is http://bit.ly/JessyRandall.