Still Motion: Poems and Photographs is a duet collection of Leo Touchet's dune photography paired with Jianqing Zheng's ekphrastic, vivid, and synesthetic poetry that illustrates, reinterprets, and reimagines the artistic vision ofTouchet's photography. This duo presents the viewers and readers with an artistic treat that transcends sensory limitations and enables them to immerse into the visual universe of tranquil dune landscapes of California and vibrant shades of Jazz Fest in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Zheng primarily selects two kinds of photographs from Touchet's vast collection: dune landscapes from California and Texas and snapshots of Jazz Fest in New Orleans, Louisiana. The first eight poems in this duet accompany the scenic and agile landscape shots of the dunes in Death Valley National Park, California. These dunes symbolize vastness and solitude that is untouched by human influence. Touchet captures the artistic patterns of sand structures with delicate detailing, which appear to be carefully pained. His dune photographs masterfully capture the majesty of the deserts through smooth-rolling forms of sand sculptures formed by natural forces over time. His photographs p lay elegantly with light and shadow, creating a natural geometry resembling abstract paintings.

Zheng employs diverse poetic forms, including haiku (a three-line Japanese poem), haibun (a prose poem accompanied by a haiku), tanka (a five-line Japanese poem), tanka prose (a prose poem accompanied by a tanka), free-verse lyric poetry, and shape poetry (poems visually shaped to reflect their essence). Zheng uses nature images set in motion to take his readers into the artistic views of nature that Touchet wishes to show through his photography. And then, he brings them back to reality, juxtaposing the serenity and wildness of nature against the deeper truths about human lives.

In the poem "Ripple Effect," which accompanies a 1996 photograph of Mesquite Flats Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park, California (20), Zheng takes readers through the gentle, spontaneous movements of "blowing sand" merging into "lake ripples" that stretch endlessly into the vast lake.

Wind blows sand to bounce into a natural painting of lake ripples pushing
on and on into more ripples stretching out of sight.

seeing
two swans'
lake ballet
we start to pace
arm in arm (21)

The first half of the poem, written in the free-verse lyric form, gracefully meditates on the tension between the aesthetic beauty of nature and people's lived experiences. The opening prose section presents the aesthetic, beautified, and organic painting of nature not made by humans but by the elemental forces of wind, sun, water, and gravity. The following stanza romanticizes nature imagery through a tenderly romantic moment when a couple starts feeling intimate towards each other, inspired by the sight of two swans performing a "lake ballet."

This view charming the eye may not charm the mind in real life.
When inflation causes low employment and high prices of food
and services, its ripple effect casts a collective shadow out of sight.

pillow talk
about delayed retirement
delays sleep (21)

However, Zheng brings us back to reality in the second half of the poem, which contains prose and haiku, where we come face to face with the real world that is full of uncertainty and ripples of many problems such as inflation, unemployment, high prices of food and services, delayed retirement and lack of sleep. Here, the poet juxtaposes

This duet collection also gives the readers a taste of Zheng's profound artistic sense of photography as an art. In his ekphrastic poetry, he preserves the visual properties of the marvelous dune sights through his striking imagery and the visual shapes of the poems, which are arranged and printed on the page, resembling the essence Another two poems that imbibe the visual shape of Touchet's photographs are "Celebration," which reflects the shape of umbrellas people hold as they dance in the second line of a Jazz Funeral, and "Jazz Pop," an appealing shape poem arranged in the form of a Coke bottle that is a mark of people's celebration during the Jazz Fest in New Orleans, Louisiana.