Public Papers

Toby Altman

2026 Chapbook and Exhibition

Public Papers is exhibited at the LookOut Gallery in East Lansing, MI from September 11—October 9, 2026 and at Public Space One in Iowa City, IA from November 13—December 19, 2026. 

What happens when we invite the land to read the poetry that we write upon it? Public Papers poses this question, bringing poetry into intimate contact with the land and ecology of Iowa,
Illinois, and Michigan. In April 2026, the poet Toby Altman travelled across the Midwest, burying packets of his poems in friends’ yards. In August, he returned and dug them up. This
exhibit documents the process and displays the results.

This gesture emerges from—and extends—Altman’s 2026 book, Jewel Box. Jewel Box is a lyric study of the architect Louis Sullivan. Sullivan is often understood to inaugurate a specifically
American style of architecture. Lewis Mumford, for instance, describes him as “the first architect in America to come to know himself with any fullness in relation to his soil, period, and
civilization.”

But Sullivan consistently fails to acknowledge the history of genocide and dispossession that made his architecture possible. His architectural innovations come at the cost of a full reckoning
with his “soil, period, and civilization.” In this respect, Sullivan is not alone: as Altman writes in Jewel Box, “Sullivan and I have different ideological relationships with colonialism. We have the
same material relationship to it…My life is part of the colony’s life. Likewise, the beauty that has nourished me.”

Public Papers does not propose to heal the wounds of colonialism. But it does try to articulate an alternate logic by which we might engage with this place—the Midwest, the United States—and its history. In response to Sullivan’s mystifications of the conditions of his “soil, period, and civilization,” this exhibit offers a literal engagement between soil and poem, building and
history, past and present.

TOBY ALTMAN is the author of Jewel Box (Essay Press, 2025), Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2023), and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He has received fellowships from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Northwestern University and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches at Michigan State University, where he is Assistant Professor in the Residential College of the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) and Director of the RCAH Center for Poetry.