Mike Monteiro's black and white one-line quips have graced our screens many times, ranging from the witty to the acerbic to the contemplative. They read: I told my therapist about you., I'm an island of such great complexity., and You're impossible. His newest project, however, a book self-published on Blurb titled Firecracker, strings together the intimate and revealing thoughts of a nameless man experiencing a breakup. His fallen hero is a security guard at a museum, who wanders around the Kiki Smith installation contemplating whether or not to call his lost love. He writes, "Picked up a Kiki Smith postcard in the gift shop. Might mail it to her. might not." This man's crisis is deeply personal yet also mundane, and as I read through, looking at the pictures by Ryan Carver that accompany Mike's words, I think: I've been here. The magical part, though, is that everyone else has too.

The cover of Firecracker

In the track Woke Up New by John Darnielle of the band, The Mountain Goats, the second refrain of the song reads,

the first time I made coffee for just myself,
I made too much of it.
but I drank it all,
just 'cause you hate it when I let things go to waste.
and I wandered through the house, like a little boy lost at the mall.
and an astronaut could've seen the hunger in my eyes from space.

Like Darnielle's caffeine-driven return to single-dom, the text on a page of Mike and Ryan's book reads, "Damnit. Poured two cups of coffee again." These are the predictable-as-a-screenplay actions of the newly single and mourning: refusing to sleep on the other side of the bed, buying letterhead and postcards you will never send and exerting calculated restraint from engaging in any of the means of communication that grace us in this modern era. The updated facebook status? A real heartbreaker.

The actions' predictability, however, also enables every reader great empathy for our security guard's tale of love and loss. Carver's images, also of the delightfully mundane—jugs of milk, shrubbery, parking lots, cars and empty roads—riff on photographic stereotypes of the forlorn wayfarer, but are worthwhile and stand-alone depictions of each.

Mike and Ryan have entered Firecracker into Blurb's fantastic Photography.Book.Now competition (won in the past by photographers Beth Dow and Kurt Tong). You can support Mike and Ryan's bid for the People's Choice Award by voting for them before August 20th and also preview the entire book on the site. Firecracker is available for purchase directly from Blurb for $40.00, and as with all Blurb books, 100% of the markup from the production price of the book goes directly to the artists.

We'll have a round-up of other JBP artists with books on Blurb soon, so stay tuned, and in the meantime have a look through Firecracker.