Lightboxes is a book that combines lyrical memoir with research to create a personal archive documenting the author’s life in conversation with the art of other women. 

Expanding the ekphrastic tradition, Rochelle Hurt creates adaptations of gallery cards in the form of prose poems responding to visual and performance art made by women. In these poems, personal experience, associative imagery, and biographical details all become entry points for reflection on specific works of art and their creators. Each poem is a small lightbox, an artist’s tool that allows the author to trace the intersections of public and private life, particularly queer women, illuminating shared cultural and historical contexts spanning more than one hundred years. In these vulnerable and playful meditations on gender, sexuality, spectacle, and creation, the reader is invited to witness intimate acts of looking.