Artist, poet, and writer Nico Vassilakis’s books include the poetry collection Disparate Magnets (2009) as well as the visual poetry book staring@poetics (2011). Vassilakis edited Clear-Cut: Anthology: A Collection of Seattle Writers (1996) and has served as coeditor of Sub Rosa Press. In 1994, he founded the Subtext Reading Series in Seattle, where he currently lives. His visual and video poetry is composed of letters and phrase fragments that are swept or cut into shapes emphasizing their structural qualities and ephemeral nature. Referring to Vassilakis’s visual poetry as “less a work of grammar and words than an experiment with typography,” the Stranger critic Paul Constant observed how he “works at the words, shoving them together and seeing what they do to each other when placed in close proximity.”