Rainier Maria Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, bound in two praying ceramic hands. Books of hours were used to pray at fixed times of day.

Rilke's God isn't a manmade, gilt, authoritarian god but one of nature, darkness, and oblivion. Barrows and Macy's idiosyncratic free verse translation, which also omits and combines some poems, adds a sense of freedom to the original German, which is metered and rhymed and can feel singsong. I fell in love with this poem in particular:

I, 3

I have many brothers in the South
who move, handsome in their vestments,
through cloister gardens.
The Madonnas they make are so human,
and I dream often of their Titians, where God becomes an ardent flame.

But when I lean over the chasm of myself—
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.

More I don't know, because my branches rest in deep silence,
stirred only by the wind.

Process

I first sculpted the hands from stoneware and glazed them with copper carbonate wash and clear glaze, then scanned their bases to create vector shapes for laser-cutting the signatures and endpapers. I extracted the text from a digital file, laid it out in the narrow hand-shaped pages, then imposed and printed the four signatures, registering the front, back, and laser cut. I dyed the individual pages with spirulina, then adapted a coptic stitch to bind oddly shaped covers to short-spined signatures and latch the book closed when hanging from its cord. I wove kumihimo cord for the wrists and finally glued in the endpapers.

Details

4"×7"×4.5". Stoneware, glaze, copper carbonate, waxed thread, butcher twine, 28lb paper, spirulina.