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Hooker's Trap is part of a project about the plot of land I live on, including—among other fellow creatures—its mice. For a while, I didn't know where to start a piece about them. But once I decided on a collage and realized how much my life with mice revolved around listening for them, I had my door in. From then on, the materials I found became my guide. The serendipity [Archive.org] offers makes the site one of my favorites to search around in, complemented by Wikipedia, of course. On the former I came across [Control of Domestic Rats & Mice] (ERIC, 1969) for the mouse illustration and [the David Rumsey Map Collection] with the Reynolds/Emslie 1850 Acoustics diagram for the illustrations related to hearing (image credit: David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries). The entry for mousetrap on Wikipedia eventually led me to [Hooker's patent from 1894 for his spring trap], which furnished the phrases and the trap diagram for the piece. Feel free to read the poem in any direction or otherwise play around with it.