Patricia Z Smith

Unleash your senses with The Life and Times of Forever, a visual feast bursting with colour, texture, and surprise. This captivating collection of photo collages transcends the still life, weaving lush close-ups of flowers, fruits, vegetables, and sculpture with fragments of poetry. Each meticulously crafted image unfolds like a hidden world, inviting you to see something completely new each time you look at it. With her trademark eye for whimsy and unexpected juxtapositions, Patricia Z. Smith uses a playful exploration of nature's abundance to create a unique memoir — walking us through the way she sees the world.

Photoscapes and the Egg is an intimate book to be savoured and kept nearby, perhaps on a coffee table because of its sheer beauty. Inside its robin egg blue cloth cover are improvised photos of objects, nature, and art, each matched with a photo of an egg inside a cosmic circle — eggs with personalities from the calm ethereal to the hot aggressive. In full, there are more than 100 stunning colour photos, all taken with an iPhone. The match of phenomena and eggs alludes to the dance of the material world with the invisible “birthing source” represented by the egg. Accompanying text and poems bring stories to the dance. The juxtapositions evoke surprise, insight, emotions, hope, and refreshment. They make wry jokes and touch on realities beyond the obvious. This book contains unabashed gentleness and spiritual toughness without pretence. Photoscapes and the Egg sprang from the mind of Patricia Z. Smith, a 79-year-old photographer and writer with extensive life experience and a pull since childhood to meld the physical with the esoteric. The design by Louis Brody is modern and serene. The book is a gift to the reader and her or his friends. It is a resource for these times and our future.

Complements is a gem, an intimate book to be savoured on first readings and held near as a resource on what is meaningful. It contains 110 luscious photos of small objects juxtaposed in ways that evoke emotions, thoughts, questions, and remembrance of beauty. The photographs tell stories, make wry jokes, and allude to the larger realities of the esoteric. As complements, the objects are more than the sum of their parts. A sentence or two of text accompanies each photograph, creating storylines that draw the viewer into the world of the objects as strongly as if the objects were human, except their not being human allows the viewer a purer sense of the message of their story. David Hume Kennerly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, says in the foreword, “The narrative and pictures reunite twins separated at birth.” The photographs pull the viewer in with their emotional content, then ask the viewer to step back for another look — to both feel and think, to understand truths beyond words. Complements is a gem, an intimate book to be savoured on first readings and held near as a resource on what is meaningful. It contains 110 luscious photos of small objects juxtaposed in ways that evoke emotions, thoughts, questions, and remembrance of beauty. The photographs tell stories, make wry jokes, and allude to the larger realities of the esoteric. As complements, the objects are more than the sum of their parts. A sentence or two of text accompanies each photograph, creating storylines that draw the viewer into the world of the objects as strongly as if the objects were human, except their not being human allows the viewer a purer sense of the message of their story. David Hume Kennerly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, says in the foreword, “The narrative and pictures reunite twins separated at birth.” The photographs pull the viewer in with their emotional content, then ask the viewer to step back for another look—to both feel and think, to understand truths beyond words. More book information can be found at: www.complementsthebook.com