Letters to a Young Poet

Project
Letters to a Young Poet
Year
2025
Medium
Book Design

This project is a visual response to Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, using 35mm imagery taken over recent years, textures, and hand-drawn elements. The design translates the emotional and philosophical themes of the text into a visual language.

Process

In reading these letters, I found a recurring ache, between presence and absence, the place one inhabits and the place one imagines. An innate longing to be elsewhere. I wanted to communicate that sense of displacement through visual imagery. Throughout the book, selected lines from Rilke’s letters are called out and set into relation with images. At times, the connections are almost literal, and other times, more abstract.