This beautiful book is a fully integrated work of art, published in April 2025 by 5 Islands Press: poetry, photography and design come together in this beautifully produced love song to the city that has been Noelia Ramon’s home for many years. It looks like—and is—a book with which you will never want to part: start thinking now of excuses for not lending it to your friends! This is a truly unique production, that captures a city as if glimpsed through the windows of a train. What is glimpsed, for the most part, are the “ordinary things” (a yellow chair, a teal teacup, a gull, a woman with an ice-cream, shadows, a cat in a pram, a bamboo thicket, a jazz busker, a kookaburra by the Opera House, a man in a photograph) and the ordinary moments (skating the botanic gardens, taking a dance class, remembering a dream of one’s father, observing two lovers kiss, meeting passers-by camped by a beach, walking in the rain, drinking coffee at a café, visiting an art gallery, feeling useless and far from home) that Noelia Ramon attends to and seeks to care for in these poems.

THE MAN IN THE PHOTOGRAPH  is like a city glimpsed through  the windows of a train on which we travel. Art—including the multiple arts Noelia Ramon practises here (poetry, illustration, photography, not to mention book design)—frames and catches moments, stills the stream of time, and lets the artist and her readers, her viewers, keep them; by extension, we keep our own moments again and again in imagination, in memory.

And it is mostly the “ordinary things” (a yellow chair, a teal teacup, a gull, a woman with an ice-cream, shadows, a cat in a pram, a bamboo thicket, a jazz busker, a kookaburra by the Opera House, a man in a photograph) and the ordinary moments (skating the botanic gardens, taking a dance class, remembering a dream of one’s father, observing  two lovers kiss, meeting passers-by camped by a beach, walking in the rain, drinking coffee at a café, visiting an art gallery, feeling useless and far from home) that Noelia Ramon attends to and seeks to care for in these poems. Reading this book, feeling its design—cutting back and forward in time and place, switching point of view as in a movie—you might feel, even if the poet did not always feel it herself, that you have fallen back into a deeper coherence with the way things really are, and back in step with your one intended life.