From October 2023 to June 2024, every two weeks, a fragment of poetry, literature or imagery was sent by email as a suggested theme. Participation was free, and the book contains almost all the contributions received. The suggested themes included truth, the mother, conspiracy, flowers, childhood, distraction, responsibility, friendship and radiance.

SLANT N°1 grew out of the first fragment sent on Wednesday, 11 October 2023: a collage based on a poem by Emily Dickinson about telling the truth, but always at a slant. Beyond this initial poetic intuition, the idea is to resist arid isolation, because a thought is never alone. It is illuminated at second glance; a continuous weighing fixes it. This is the aesthetic of relation, the lesson of the watershed. Édouard Glissant called for “the transmutation of reflective solitude into shared inflection” and described poetry as “a convulsive search for a shadow of oneself that creates within itself signs of friendship.”

SLANT suggests coming to terms with the fire of diversity and impure relationships. Dense with hidden references, it is a poetic research project—or rather, poetry in search of reference. Poetry is an open space where no absolute conclusion can be reached. It may be our common ground: the realm of the outside and the other. Its subtitle, to be the receiver and the maker all at once, expresses this desire to remain in continuous reception: to extend the poetic moment, create a loop, receive in order to give, read in order to write, write and then read again. Doubled work, second-hand work. Thought never in isolation, but in “re-co-naissance” or correspondence.