Ink Earl - Paperback
by Susan Holbrook (Author)
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.
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).
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