In 2013, Tim Liardet met an American poet during a blizzard in Boston and the two began an immediate, life-transforming love affair. The World Before Snow was the result. In a book of passionate extremes, the self-portrait— itself reinvented—documents the ways in which a very particular species of love can allow for the rediscovery of identity, as all fragments of persona put forth to the world are stripped down to expose the raw self.