Inherent

Shortlisted for the 2025 Nelson Ball Prize

Typography broken down into its most basic (and beautiful) forms to reveal the inherent voice within each shape.

Inherent is a collection of concrete poems that uses poetic tools to reduce words and letters and characters to their structural components, celebrating the shapes we’re used to taking for granted. Produced by physically scraping each letter onto the page using Letraset sheets—a process of tangible transference that requires irrevocable choice—this is a poetry of format that plays with aspects of form and design to demonstrate each typeface’s individual poetic stance.

Sitting somewhere between Hanjorg Mayer’s Futura and Johanna Drucker’s concrete poetics, with a hint of punk DIY zine culture and a heavy study of typographic graphic design, Inherent moves with palindromic rotational symmetry, arrays of potential landscapes, and alien languages where the Roman alphabet goes supernova into brilliant new forms.

"These works shimmer, shake, and vibrate with excitement."—Johanna Drucker, author of Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Presentand Diagrammatic Writing

Kevin Stebner is an artist, poet and musician. He produces visual art using old videogame gear, and produces music and soundtracking with his chiptune project GreyScreen, post-hardcore in his band Fulfilment, as well as alt-country in the band Cold Water. Stebner has published a number of typewriter visual poems and other concrete work in chapbooks. He is also the proprietor of Calgary’s best bookstore that’s in a shed, Shed Books. Stebner lives in Calgary, Alberta.