The Poetry Box is a text and image artwork presented as a game investigating the relationship between words and images and exploring the conventions of portraiture. It grew from an invitation to participate in an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in which a number of artists responded to an artifact in the museum's Japanese collection.

Hogan chose a 19th-century poetry card game, uta karuta, whose origins combine a traditional clamshell-matching game with European playing cards. Uta karuta relies on the players having a knowledge of the hyakunin ishu, an anthology of 31-syllable poems by different poets. As there is no comparable, universally-known canon of poetry, Hogan needed another approach in making her own version of uta karuta. Wanting to mirror the mix of structure and randomness in the game itself, she invited one hundred people to nominate a poem for inclusion. They comprised a cross-section of age, occupation and background and their choices provided a small-scale survey of who has been reading what and why at the beginning of the 21st Century.

The game comprises the first and last lines of poems on cards with related images, including portraits of the poets. The aim is to match the first and last lines.

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