Get Closer

Vanishing memories and shared anxieties emerge through a lens, revealing how we remember and misremember.

In his latest collection, Ryan Van Winkle uses photographs to access themes of abandonment, generational incomprehension and the very notion of how we end up where we are. This collection is a poetic photo album.

Through these poems, Van Winkle looks at life througha lens – to get closer – to meditate on the anxieties and insecurities of a life. He reckons with how we remember and misremember, and how memories and people can be difficult, and at times painful, to hold on to. In reading this collection it becomes clear that while photographs can be carefully ordered, the emotions and impressions surrounding them cannot.Longlisted for The Saltire Awards 2026 Poetry Book of the Year.

Ryan Van Winkle, an American who has been living in Scotland for over 25 years, is an award-winning author, artist and producer based in Edinburgh. He is currently the Artistic Director of StAnza, Scotland's International Poetry Festival. His first collection, Tomorrow, We Will Live Here (Salt), won the Crashaw Prize. In 2015, his second collection, The Good Dark (Penned in the Margins), won the Saltire Society’s Poetry Book of the Year award. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and New Writing Scotland.