Indelible Ink

Every year, a small community of poets scattered across the United States and around the world takes part in a quiet act of creative faith: the Postcard Poetry Fest. Each poet paints or designs thirty original postcards, writes thirty first-draft poems directly onto the back of each one, and mails them out to fellow poets - sight unseen, one card a day, for thirty days.

Indelible Ink is artist and poet Jennifer Gurney's record of that exchange in 2025. Working in two intense, single-day sessions - one day to paint all thirty postcards, the next to write all thirty poems - Gurney created a collection that captures both the discipline and the spontaneity of the form. There is no editing, no revising, no second-guessing: each poem is a true first draft, composed in real time on the surface of a small painted card, then dropped in the mail before there was time to overthink it.

This book brings together, for the first time, the full set of original paintings alongside the unpolished, immediate poems written on their backs - a rare, intimate look at a working artist's creative process at full speed. Readers will also find Gurney's reflections on the project itself: the joy of painting thirty postcards in a single sitting, the pressure and freedom of writing poetry with no time to revise, and the daily ritual that followed - walking to the mailbox and finding it filled with postcards from poets near and far, each one a small, handmade gift from a stranger who had done the very same thing.

Part visual art book, part poetry collection, part diary of a creative constraint, Indelible Ink is for readers who love ekphrastic and visual poetry, mail art, watercolor and mixed-media painting, and the growing community of postcard poetry exchanges happening worldwide. It's a celebration of first drafts, quick hands, and the strange magic of sending your work out into the world before you've had time to worry about it.