This collage appears in Eye Contact, the literary magazine I advise at Seton Hill University where I teach. The theme for this particular issue of the magazine was "truth." I clipped words and phrases out of Weekly World News to create this piece. When I began, I thought I'd build a collage of freaky and bizarre headlines, but I found myself instead pulling out the more "normal" terms and assembling them in an abnormal way. The "shout out" style of the excessive typography, I'm hoping, renders everything strangely familiar. I believe the "left behind" phrase at the center originally referred to that whole "Left Behind" Armageddon novel series phenomena, but for me it seemed to progressively suggest something entirely different about the No Child Left Behind Act as I built this collage around it as a centerpiece. I'm still not sure what it all means, if anything at all, but I had education and today's kids in mind as I built up the layers. I'm happy the students accepted it into the magazine (blind jury process). I'm looking forward to seeing the weblog for the magazine develop next year into a full-fledged online version of the mag.

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