David Villaverde’s “Gnomon” is a multimodal, layered poem that began with a “two truths and one lie” conceit about the environment and ended up as a meditation on the human capacity for horror, both causing and grappling with it. The PDF below gathers some of the drafts that resulted in the final poem, published in The Adroit Journal. I spoke with Villaverde over Zoom about the function of poetry and how the personal becomes the universal. Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): The fi