Card Shark (a Poem)

Debbie Millman’s newset book Self Portrait as Your Traitor is coming out November 8th. WIth permission of the publisher, we are reprinting a visual poem from the book entitled “Card Shark”.

Editor’s Note: How do you read a piece of art that’s at once a poem and a made object? (How much of a metaphor is “read” here?) And how do you “read” that object when part of its appeal is its mystery, “Card Shark (A Poem)” being at once addressed to a card shark and about the card shark’s crypticness, which the speaker claims to learn from. But how would we know? And don’t we all know these mazes of intimacy, these intimate mazes in which, once you’re inside, you lose sight of who’s playing whom, whether you should stay? —Adam Plunkett