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- This book is the end game of the erasure poem: it erases an eraser, and in the crumbs left behind it finds a hilarious and smart range of subjects, from love to lunch.
About the author
Susan Holbrook's poetry books are the Governor General's Award-nominated and Trillium Book Award-nominated
Throaty Wipes (Coach House 2016),
Joy Is So Exhausting (Coach House 2009), which was shortlisted for the Trillium Award for Poetry, and
misled (Red Deer 1999), which was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award. With Thomas Dilworth she edited
The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (Oxford U P, 2010). Her textbook
How to Read (and Write About) Poetry was released in 2015 (Broadview), and in 2017 she edited
Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems of Daphne Marlatt (Talonbooks).
Summary
Shortlisted for the ReLit 2022 Poetry Award
ink earl takes the popular subgenre of erasure poetry to its illogical conclusion.
Starting with ad copy that extols the iconic Pink Pearl eraser, Holbrook erases and erases, revealing more and more. Rubbing out different words from this decidedly non-literary, noncanonical source text, she was left with the promise of “100 essays” and set about to find them. Among her discoveries are queer love poems, art projects, political commentary, lunch, songs, and entire extended families.
The absurdity of the constraint lends itself to plenty of fun and funny, while reminding us of truths assiduously erased by normative forces. ink earl’s variations are testament in micro to the act of poiesis as not so much a building as an intrepid series of effacements; we rub away at the walls of language we’ve lived within in order to release both what’s been written over, and what we want to say now.
Foreword
- Co-op available
- Advance reader copies (digital and print)
- National print and online campaign
- Social media campaign
