Leah Ollman – Ensnaring the Moment

Review by Rudy Vega ·

Ensnaring the Moment brings together two art forms—poetry and photography—that don’t always share the same space but feel like natural partners once they do. Edited by art critic and writer Leah Ollman, this anthology gathers over a hundred poems that speak to, from, or through the photographic image. These aren’t just poems about photos; they’re poems that use photography as metaphor, memory, document, and disruption. With a wide range of voices—from Elizabeth Bishop and Frank Bidart to Lucille Clifton and Ocean Vuong—the collection reads like a gallery of language, where each page frames a moment worth returning to.

Ollman opens the book with a thoughtful and beautifully written essay that lays the groundwork for how to approach what follows. She draws elegant connections between the line of a poem and the frame of a photograph, seeing both as structures designed to hold something ephemeral. “The camera is a type of cage,” she writes, “but inverted: what lies within, captured and contained, is defiantly, flagrantly free.” That inversion—where containment becomes liberation—is a theme that echoes throughout the anthology. Ollman isn’t just making a case for photography as an aesthetic form; she’s inviting readers to see how poems and photographs alike can hold contradiction, ambiguity, and emotion all at once.

The poems themselves move through a wide range of subjects and emotional registers. Some meditate on old family photographs or antique daguerreotypes; others deal with more painful imagery—war, erasure, grief. In Daguerreotypes, Rick Barot reflects on the racialized absences buried in 19th-century photo history. Ellen Bass’s Photograph: Jews Probably Arriving to the Lodz Ghetto confronts atrocity with haunting precision. Claudia Emerson’s Secure the Shadow reflects on postmortem portraiture with eerie tenderness, while Rae Armantrout’s Lasting distills memory into just a few perfect, glittering lines.

What makes this anthology so effective is that the poems aren’t simply describing imagined photographs. Each one acts as its own lens—interpreting, reframing, even challenging what the image might mean. They don’t just accompany the visual; they complicate it. A photograph might offer the texture of a moment, but a poem can render its breath. Or, conversely, a poem might float toward the abstract, while a photograph pins it to the real. Together, they create a space of dialogue—one that expands the ways we think about seeing, remembering, and feeling.

Ensnaring the Moment is not a book to breeze through. It rewards slow reading and even slower contemplation. The structure doesn’t follow a narrative arc but instead offers a kind of rhythmic unfolding—poem after poem, moment after moment, each building quietly on the last. It’s more like walking through a carefully curated gallery than reading a traditional anthology. You stop, take in what’s on the wall (or the page), reflect, and move on only when you’re ready.

Throughout the book, there’s a current of grief—grief for lost people, lost time, lost clarity—but also a sense of defiance. Many of the poems resist closure, just as the photographs they invoke resist simple narratives. Some pairings resonate quietly; others spark dissonance. Either way, the collection asks the reader to sit with tension, to make peace with ambiguity.

Ollman is wise not to offer a prescriptive reading of the work. Her curatorial approach leaves space for the reader to engage freely, to draw their own connections. She situates the anthology within a broader tradition of image-text relationships but never allows theory to overshadow feeling. That balance—between intellect and emotion, between precision and openness—is what gives the book its staying power.

In the end, Ensnaring the Moment doesn’t try to define the relationship between poetry and photography. Instead, it creates space for the two to meet—sometimes gently, sometimes with friction—and for the reader to witness what happens in between. It’s a collection full of quiet revelations, where the most powerful moments are not the ones pinned down, but the ones that slip just out of reach, asking us to look again.

Contributing Editor Rudy Vega resides in Irvine, California. He is a fine art photographer and writer.

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Leah Ollman – Ensnaring the Moment

Photographer: An anthology of photographers. Images: Private collections

Poets: Listed on back cover

Essays: Leah Ollman

Language: English

Editor: Leah Ollman

Book Design: Guenet Abraham

Hardcover; offset printing; 288 pages; 9.5 x 7 inches; ISBN 979-8-9899602-2-4

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