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 layering them 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.