Vitruvian Shorthand

Some things can only be measured by living them.

Vitruvian Shorthand is a chapbook collection of poems and short stories arranged in four movements - an intimate autobiography told through invention, myth, memory, and measured observation. These are verses about the fathers who taught without speaking, the mothers who built kingdoms out of ordinary afternoons, the children who ask questions no one is brave enough to answer. They are about hatcheries and cartographers, mercenaries on meaningless hills, elf owls in desert storms, and the unnamed thing that holds everything together that has no name and needs none.

Drawn from anticipation of a first child's birth and her earliest days, these poems and stories move between the personal and the mythic, the scientific and the fairy-tale - always returning to the same question the book asks from its first page: what does it mean to take your own measure?

In four movements - Circled and Squared, Scaled and Measured, Notes and Staff, On Living Forever - Hunter August Wedemeyer writes about grief that is not yet named, freedom that turns into coastline, and the particular ache of love that has no proof but left more than said.

For anyone who has stood at the edge of something and tried to write it down.