Anthony Howell‘s poem, ‘Envelopes’, is inspired by the life and work of Mark Lombardi, an American neo-conceptual artist who specialized in drawings that document alleged financial and political frauds by power brokers, government agencies and organised crime, thus mapping abuses of control. His suicide by hanging is disputed.

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Mark Lombardi  (1961-2000)

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Anthony has supplied the following  introduction to his poem:

Perhaps the reader’s  appreciation of this poem might be enhanced by some discourse around it. Aphrodite – goddess of Beauty, not Love – was the wife of Hephaistos, the blacksmith and arms-dealer to the gods. In her book Interlock – Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi (Counterpoint, Berkley 2015) Patricia Goldstone argues that the global web of corruption and terror that Lombardi delineates graphically is akin to a rhizome in the sense that it does not have a single head, but like a…