The Heavy Crown

The Heavy Crown is a heroic crown of visual sonnets made by compiling all of Shakespeare's sonnets into a series of fifteen composite images and layered to form concentrated lines of overlapping text. The fifteenth poem, or master-sonnet, comprises the first line of each of the fourteen preceding visual sonnets.

Shakespeare's poems are a popular site of experimentation and adaptation by contemporary poets. This series approaches Shakespeare as an accumulation of text, a literary weight we inherit in form as well as content, to foreground his mediation by centuries of editors and publishers.