The glass book is produced for The Box, a bookstore located by the Seine in Paris that publishes artists' books. The glass book is created to commemorate the poet Paul Celan, who drowned himself in the Seine. Celan, who characterized his poems as "a message in the bottle", inspired the form. On the outer surface of the bottle is etched, in reverse, Celan's last poem Rebleute Graben. The etched text is projected within the water of the bottle.

...German culture was the pinnacle of Western civilisation. It promised something better than feudal sniping. Inspired by his mother's deep love for it's poetry, he wrote lyric poems in the tradition of Hölderlin and Rilke. It is said that as a youth he had a remarkable affinity for it too. His taste moved him toward the contemporary symbolist and surrealist movements, and despite his polylingual abilities, he always wrote his poetry in German; his muttersprache.

Then war came. Celan was, by chance, separated from his parents on the day the Nazis arrived and deported the city's Jews. He never saw his parents again. They were taken to a Ukrainian labour camp. His father died of disease; his mother was shot. After this, as Hugo Gryn said, Celan was in the position of being a writer in the language of his mother and of his mother's murderers. He could not renounce the latter's language without renouncing the former's. Celan was robbed of his parents' death as well as their lives. Bonnefoy implies the same goes for his müttersprache.

"We can say of Celan as of no other poet: his words did not recover his experience. The loss was felt," he says, "like a discharge without origin or end." And as a result: "nothing real could authentically respond to this flux or be its equal, in the absolute, as referent: only the river itself … seems to fold in on itself (losing itself) like the only thing signified on the scale of so much absence."

I will enter the coming age it seems
but it seems I will not see it coming