Let's imagine a crazy inventor: he gets up in the morning, drinks coffee, and goes to his workshop. In the workshop, various strange objects, tools, and devices are piled up in disorder. He takes a little from here and a little from there, piles everything on his workbench, and asks himself: What will I invent today?

In the collection before us, Yoram Nesselwsky approaches his literary workshop and uses everything at hand to assemble, disassemble, understand, or transform the mechanisms that make up our existence: linguistic and intellectual, social and emotional, physical and philosophical mechanisms.

Forty images are included in the former pole vault champion, forty short texts, like musical baguettes, which have in common the movement and the collision – between possibilities and meanings. This is prose that gives up the pretense of encompassing multiplicity and replaces it with a fleeting glance that illuminates only for a moment, like a firefly; in a brief play of idea and image, which opens an opening for imagination.

The Former Pole Vault Champion is Yoram Nesselwsky's third book and the first to be published by Nine Souls, after many translations by him were published by the publisher.