Obliterations [Paperback]

Every day we are forced to integrate the world’s news into our personal lives; we all have to decide what parts of the flood of news resonate with us and what we need to turn away from, out of necessity or sensitivity.Obliterations—a collection of erasure poems that useThe New York Timesas their source texts—springs from that seemingly immediate process of personalizing news information. By cutting, synthesizing and arranging existing news items into new poems, the erasure process creates a link between the authors’ poetic sensibilities and the supposedly more “objective” view of the newsmakers. Each author used the same articles but wrote separate erasures without seeing the other’s versions, highlighting the wonderful similarities and differences that arise when two works—or any two people with individual tastes and lenses—share the same stories.

“In the spirit of Michaelangelo who saw the angel in the marble and carved until he set it free, I contend that these poems are not so much the result of something that has been erased (a word which invariably bears the unfortunate baggage of annulment and invalidity), but rather they are the consequence of a craftswoman’s—two craftswomen’s!—steady hand, the wisdom of her chisel, and the impeccable eye of the best kind of artist: the one who can see through the medium and into the message. What especially sets these poems apart from other erasures I've encountered is their absolute resistance to abstraction. These are as concrete as garden sculptures.”
—Jill Alexander Essbaum, New York Times bestselling author ofHausfrau

“A long time ago, JP and Heather were students in my poetry class. They were pretty advanced and super-prolific, and, frankly, they were annoying the hell out of me. So I decided to keep them busy with some impossible extra-credit work. They were younl3œ