Now Available !
Extended Sale!
DEC. 4th to DEC 14th., 2025, WE ARE OFFERING A SPECIAL SALE PRICE & A GIFT FOR PURCHASERS:
Every purchase of IN THE BLUEPRINT OF HER IRIS will include FREE SHIPPING plus a complimentary PDF of an exclusive brand new collaborative work by Vikki C. (poem) and Robert Frede Kenter (art) not in the collection.
PURCHASE ‘IN THE BLUEPRINT OF HER IRIS’ below & we will email the new work ‘For Love, We Attempt Another Ars Poetica’ for the duration of the sale.
TY SO MUCH IN ADVANCE. Robert & Vikki C.
In The Blueprint of Her Iris is a collaboration between Vikki C. (Poems) and Robert Frede Kenter (Images). It is 69 pages, full colour, 6″ x 9″ dimensions. Purchase it here:
For orders in the US and internationally US $19.99 + FREE shipping 
For orders in Canada CAD $23.99 + FREE shipping
From the Preface:
A tribute to the pellucid beauty of convergence, the narrative explores spiritual evolution through synergy and dream-experiences between poet and artist. Together, we open the subconscious doors to a multifaceted gallery of unresolved eco-human emergencies and paradoxes.
From pre-dawn origins to themes of heritage, identity and diaspora, the arc moves beyond prescribed academic constructs towards novel modes of self-interrogation via landscapes of interiority and otherness. A complex lattice transporting the reader towards an envisioned post-human world.
Within the frames of this gallery, poetry and image converse seamlessly, blurring barriers and subverting the philosophical canon of existentialism – enjoining us in an ethereal journey of cathartic awakening. A transcendence, not only across language and art, but also the scoring and notation of fragile bindings and delicate ecologies.
Vikki C. & Robert Frede Kenter
Vikki C. and Robert Frede Kenter
Author and Artist Statements
When Robert and I first conceived the idea for this book, we intended for it to be more than just a collection of poems and accompanying images. Our vision was to create a dynamic, cross-genre experience which merges the essence of both words and image and distils them into a greater, more expansive dialogue. Essentially, this meant a call-and-response relationship between poet and artist where hybridity was placed at the centre of our process.
Traditionally, for me, poetry evolves out of personal experience, memory, heritage and the broad everyday human spectrum. I began writing, poem after poem, drawing on these themes, with an acute awareness that I was providing perhaps 70% of the arc on the page. I consciously factored in critical space for Robert’s innovation in bringing images that spoke interactively to my words, and vice versa. Rather than letting the writing lead in absolute, we would discuss daily how the poems and visuals were developing in parallel — a dialectic, two-way creative exchange which was effectively realised in the final product.
I believe our vision was fulfilled in opening the doors to a hybrid vernacular which immerses the audience in a fresh dimension and way of seeing both history and our place in contemporary society. Where the work behaves as a distinct “animal”, unlike the individual mediums on their own. To this end, the sequence satisfies its form and content, embracing the multifaceted nature of the human experience. Moreover, we were “co-editors” — a delightful collaborative approach that removes the “hierarchy” and mutually respects our artistic identities, whilst maintaining a professional check-and-balance mechanism. I believe this is the future of hybridity in an evolving literary landscape. To live within a means that honours the collective potential of creation.
As a longtime interdisciplinary artist, I’ve always viewed the world through an alternate, often defamiliarised lens. In the Blueprint of Her Iris challenges the thresholds of conventional language, deconstructs and rebuilds our interior world, recalibrates our spirit and luxuriates in boundless possibilities. It marks an important conversation in these complex times, and I am truly grateful to be contributing to Ice Floe’s visionary catalogue of works.
Artist Statement by Robert Frede Kenter
As EIC & publisher of Ice Floe Press, in addition to being a multi-decade long practicing writer & visual artist, I am always exploring/attempting to fine tune & animate ways in which different facets of my visual & textual praxis may be (either ‘parallel’) or participate in intersecting vectors of larger notational hybridity. I have excitedly engaged with writers & artists from around the globe in individual collaborations & convergence; a key element in the Ice Floe mission & mandate, along with advocating new forms, new visions, new approaches to breaking down barriers between creative artists & between one form or other, is our opposition to hierarchies of formalized communication. My writing increasingly envisions juxtapositions or elaborations of meaning & voice through multi-media conversations, interior & external, shared between writer, artist, reader(s).
I invited for this autumn’s publication schedule a trio of writers I admire & enjoy working with, with a view to creating a trilogy of new hybrid works that expand upon one another in magical ways. I invited Vikki C., with whom I am also in the process of working on a collaborative novella, & have developed a deep affinity to working together with, towards the goal of reimagining of history, self, ecologies, dystopia, diaspora in a shared creative space. Our daily process of thinking, conversing, visioning & sharing words, images, & talking about ‘worlds’— natural, human and post-human – has led to the development of the poems & images that form our collaboration in In The Blueprint of Her Iris.
Catherine Graham, whose work with succinctly mysterious visions at the intersection of personal and eco-imaginaries, & with whom I’ve created a few times at Ice Floe and in other contexts, will form the 2nd collection as we explore secrets, ecologies and the mysteries of myths, fairy tales and dream. The third shall be composed of Jaclyn Piudik’s experimental texts, brilliant complex interrogations of language, the body & personal identity in conversation with my recent abstract, fractured Vispo works, and is inspired by our ongoing dialogue of the past 10 years.
I subscribe that a ‘third’ entity emerges from deep collaboration, sharing & envisioning, together; that sustained collaboration can bring forth, both through building on existing forms (texts, poems, visual poems) & exploring new possibilities, spaces & a musical conclave between genres. Interplay & transformation of possibility emerges through creative juxtaposition & improvisatory experience/experimental play, both in my own work and in my collaborations with others; this sort of scoring process and hybrid arc, deeply moves me.
At Ice Floe, we hope, as the autumn of 2025 barrels along, beyond the current ethos of fear & brutality that now sees the planet in the grips of authoritarian madness and environmental crisis, we continue to shape our labours and manifest presence for resistance, creative expression, beauty, hope, change and light in the world.
An excerpt from the work:
A STUDY IN PIANISM & TIME SIGNATURESThe sheerest hour of uncut light casts us in duet.
Displaces common prose from glass rooms.
Only an instrumental bends to shape a cold river.
No other medicine is prescribed. A bed and
a shifting coast know the tension of a harp.
You place a lily in a vase destined to break after Proust.
I tend the byways of a land greater than its topography.
Like photographing the city—not for its arches—
but she whose dress directs the wind from the cage.
Placing flowers in my arms, I worry of your intent.
Try to love, you say. The world may end on a minor chord.
I search for a warmer key. For a lamplit resolution.
But lakes glitter where we are not. There is a door
in passing too, and a square of violet where bodies merge.
But the fugal road stretches further
—and the forest has its hostages.
Advanced Praise
Dreamy, hypnotic and musically driven, the poems from In the Blueprint of her Iris unfold and release with lush transformation. Accompanied by Robert Frede Kenter’s evocative art, these collaborations complement and enrich one another. Charged and reaching, they move through liminal spaces and beyond, creating an immersive experience for readers to dwell in. ”Duplicity in every naked frame.”Delicate yet weighty, these poems and images touch light. “How I am obliged to hunt for something that outruns me.”
–Catherine Graham (Put Flowers Around Us & Pretend We’re Dead)
On my first encounter with Vikki C. and Robert Frede Kenter’s haunting collaborative collection, In the Blueprint of Her Iris, I was instantly enchanted by the echoes of luminescence and colour in its title. It primed me for my entry into a rich experience of eco-human landscapes and otherworldly realism, a terrain where the trembling phrase, the refracted word, emerge in softness.
Here, we stand at a border, at the lip of a wound, in the seams between time and place wondering whether we are gazing through a window or looking into a mirror. Vikki’s lush, often unexpected, imagery – “Because a butterfly’s hues dissolve on flight, God created moths the shade of cocaine” – serve as a conduit for profound explorations of personal and collective grief, love and longing, spiritual inquiry, migration and memory.
Her juxtapositions of language stir: words brush up against one another and their friction ignites novel ways of perceiving human fragility and its relationship to the natural world: “Fevers come to mean love or endings: / that our bed is not one place, / but every field we no longer recognise.” Kenter’s visuals vibrate with their own numinous beauty, harmonizing perfectly with the poetry. Yet the artwork is far more than adornment or illustration. Instead, the pairings give rise to a third space where we luxuriate in the brilliant energy born of the conversation between text and image.
In the Blueprint of Her Iris is a refuge: even when it asks us to reflect on our pain, it does so with tenderness. “Without asking—[it] shows us our wounded constellations”—and moves us to linger.
–Jaclyn Piudik (The Dark Oar, Celan translations)
Vikki C. is a London-born poet, essayist and musician whose writing appears widely across US, Canada, UK and Europe and has been nominated for ‘The Pushcart Prize’, ‘Best of the Net’ and the ‘Orison Best Spiritual Literature’. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in venues like EcoTheo Review, The Inflectionist Review, The Blue Mountain Review, Grain Magazine, Harpy Hybrid Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Sweet Literary, Ballast Journal, Ice Floe Press, Black Bough Poetry, Amethyst Review, Sublunary Review, Acropolis Journal, Sunday Mornings at the River, Dust Poetry Magazine, The Winged Moon, and Bacopa Literary Review, among others. She is the author of The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press, 2022), Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024) and the collaborative hybrid collection In The Blueprint of Her Iris (Ice Floe Press, 2025). Linktree: linktr.ee/vikki_c._author
Robert Frede Kenter is a poet, visual artist, creator of hybrids, an essayist spoken word artist & publisher of Ice Floe Press, www.icefloepress.net. Books include FATHER TECTONIC (Ethel Zine, 2025), Eden (2021), & Audacity of Form (Ice Floe Press, 2019). Work is published widely, recently or forthcoming in ABR, ballast, Harpy Hybrid, Otoliths, Olney, Storms Journal, Scissors & Spackle, Acropolis, The Prose Poem, Watch Your Head, Fevers Of. Robert’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies including InterPoem 1 & 2 (Sedserio, 2023/4), Book of Penteract (Penteract Press, 2022), Glisk and Glimmer (Sidhe Press, 2023), and Seeing in Tongues (Steel Incisors, 2023). IG: icefloe22, r.f.k.vispocityshuffle.
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