Bird Ladder Sky Snake

In the tradition of William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts, Bird Ladder Sky Snake is a surreal, collaborative collection of dreams and a testament to artistic friendship.

For years, Rikki Ducornet and Fowzia Karimi have been exchanging dreams: one records her dreams as prose poems or stories, and the other illustrates them. The result is Bird Ladder Sky Snake, a book that resists categorization just as surely as our dreams resist our attempts at analysis or instruction: it is a memoir, an art book, a dream journal, a folk narrative, and can be flipped and read in two directions. Read one way, the dreamer is Karimi, with illustrations by Ducornet; the other, the dreamer is Ducornet, with illustrations by Karimi.

“Dreams,” Karimi writes, “are the source and substance of myth, prophecy, art, and invention; they have always shaped our lives.” Bird Ladder Sky Snake is an invitation to dream alongside two prolific artists, to follow their muse, and to slip between realms of existence.