A Difficulty Is a Light is Rebecca Norris Webb’s first hybrid poetry collection, published by Chose Commune in 2024 as a section-sewn hardcover of 80 pages and 16 plates. Its elegiac center is the suicide of her last surviving brother, following the earlier death of his identical twin. From that double loss the book opens outward — into what the publisher calls the geography of grief — moving from Trieste to Cape Cod and the Dakotas, from New England to the Carolinas, and eventually to bird migrations in the American South and northern France. The photographs, more than a dozen of them, are lyrical and unhurried, given room by an unusually generous page and trim of 23.5 by 17 centimeters, a landscape proportion that suits horizons, coastlines and birds in transit.

The book is a meditation on twinning in several registers at once: brothers and birds, grieving and migration, words and images, badlands and coastlines, seeing and dreaming. Webb has written and photographed in tandem before, most notably in My Dakota, her elegy for a brother who died unexpectedly, but here language carries the structure while images punctuate it. The effect is closer to a sequence of glimpses than to a survey; the light is followed rather than described.

The editorial and design work is Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi’s, in collaboration with Perrine Serre, and the book is bilingual in French and English. For collectors, the collaboration matters as much as the subject: Webb’s nine photography books constitute a sustained inquiry into how words and pictures might share a page without either one illustrating the other, and this volume extends that inquiry into explicit grief. It is a book to read as well as to look at, best approached slowly and in sequence.

This is the first edition, published signed, in October 2024.