who wouldn’t trade $400 for a finger?
Reasons to read The New York TImes: the puzzles, The Athletic, and gems like the source material for this erasure.
Source material:
How Much Would You Pay to Make Sure You Never Sawed Off a Finger?
Igloo Recalls Coolers Over Fingertip Amputation and Crushing Risk
And why?
First this:
Because we all need a little brightness in dark times—and if you read nothing else today—here are the Winners of the 2025 World Nature Photography Awards. Scroll down to see the blue-spotted mudskipper. You won’t be disappointed.
The what
Some of the most interesting books I read have been recommended to me by other writers. Recent finds:
Girl in a Bear Suit, poems by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn, Winner of the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award
Shark Heart, A Love Story, novel by Emily Habeck, about marriage, motherhood, metamorphosis, letting go, and a beloved husband who transforms into a great white shark (see also Let me tell you – a previous Under Construction post)
Big Breath In, novel by John Straley about a marine biologist dying from cancer, saving babies, and a ton of whale information which is both real and metaphor
The Braille Encyclopedia, Brief Essays on Altered Sight, experimental memoir in the shape of an encyclopedia, by Naomi Cohn (from Rose Metal Press)
Remember – the Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, NF by Lisa Genova, about exactly what its title says it is
And the why
All stories have an emotional engine that drives them. Mysteries run on curiosity. Thrillers run on heart-thumping adrenaline. Horror stories run on fear.
And the fuel for those emotional engines is anticipation.
Most stories use a fair bit of what’s called negatively valenced anticipation: A sense of worry. Dread. Anxiety that things will get worse. …
But guess what kind of anticipation romance novels use?
Positively valenced.
Katherine Center, in her essay disguised as an author’s note to Hello Stranger, the story of an artist that loses her ability to see faces.
Stop by. Tell us what you’re reading and what you thought of the blue-spotted mudskipper.
Original text from Emily Habeck’s novel, Shark Heart, A Love Story
The quote that haunts me: Life is hard, she thought, and instantly reconsidered. No. It is viscious.
The idea that found me: What if an erasure poem also held some or all of the o’s from the original text?
Quantum of light, the photon
Stephen King: “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
Me: “Some are more magical than others.”
Some books are all text, the images coming via words as a gift from the writer to the imagination of the reader.
Other books are also art objects, the words and images collectively becoming something more than the sum of the two, something magical. Libro Venado / Deer Book is one of those books.
Some pages are orange, some red, some other colors. Some are translucent. One accordians out in the hands of reader. Spanish text and English translations appear together on the pages and on the cover. Quantum physics and botany collaborate with cosmology and Indigenous spirituality. What looks like a tick with fourteen legs and seven eyes shares the page with a spiral around a dot, arrows rippling out in four directions. It includes the only description of photosynthesis that has ever made sense to me: “Wild little leaf, ship of lumen / Who told you to talk to the light?”
Nothing I write here will adequately convey the magical something of Libro Venado / Deer Book, but a few pages can be seen on the publisher’s website. (Scroll down for the video.)
Poetry, drawings and magic by Cecilia Vicuña.
Translation from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky.
Inspiration from Flower World Variations, poems by Jerome Rothenberg, drawings by Harold Cohen.
Recommendation from the poet Deborah Kelly. Thank you, dear friend.
What are the books, the poems, the art that stretch your imagination, your thinking, that influence what you write or the art you make, that sometimes keep you up at night? How did you find them?
Owl
I am always interested in how different poets approach the page and how different erasure artists approach their source texts.
In January 2025, my brilliant friend, X. P. Callahan, posted her Erasure: In the Cage of Breath, a digital text alteration and video.
Her work spoke to me, called to me. I wrote owl in response, using the same source text.
Here is the call: X. P. Callahan at Diary Poems.
And here is the source text: Carolyn Forché, “Harmolypi”
living rivers lakes
freshwater habitat
ponds streams bogs wetlands
dragonflies fish crabs others
at risk of extinction
pollution dams water extraction
climate change other disruptions
acting together
every river modified
dams deforestation wildfires
illegal mining illegal fires
waves of ash in the river
mercury in the water
everything wrong and
there’s nowhere to go
SOURCE TEXT
Christina Larson, “New Research Shows a Quarter of Freshwater Animals Are Threatened with Extinction.” Associated Press, 8 January 2025.
“Hon We” is a trio of poems created by erasure from “Hon or We have both traveled from the other side of some hill, one side of which we may wish we could forget,” a poem by Anis Mojgani (the same poem that X. P. Callahan used for “Erasure: Love Me,” which combines digital text alteration and collage). In the case of “Hon We,” Microsoft Word text colors and watercolor brush pens were used for the alterations, with a nod to Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s Her Read: A Graphic Poem (Texas A&M University Press, 2021).
There is an intimacy
in walking together
nearly lost in this modern age.
The slow swing of one
step after another
the thud of boot on rock
the rush of the water companion
the swish of canvas
packs and pants up the path.
We walk up and talk of the city
until the quiet crunch of pine needles
the hush of rubbing branches
the distant call of camp robber, grey jay
begins to calm, to soothe, to remind.
We walk down under thunder
patted by rain
talk now about choices
life directions
unintended and unexpected.
We stop to watch the elk
separated from our sight
by the line of lodgepole pine.
We walk. We
think. We walk again.
Your long legs
at ease on the path,
we pass the horses
then the droppings of horses
and prints of horses.
We do not pass the memory of horses.
And so it is that I am
at the Wall. Ha Kotel.
The old cold stone beneath my hand,
alive with the prayers of a million living
Jews and six million and more no
longer living. Alive
with the breath of God.
And so it is that I am called,
called, called home and
home again to where the stone grows
warm against my forehead though
it is December and we wear wool
against the cold.
Called back through my soul
through the souls of the ones before
all of us in Egypt
all of us at Sinai
all of us
in the heart of God.
I lean on the Wall and God
holds me. I lean on the Wall and God
breathes with me.
The day falls away and I
stand in the wind on Masada.
Desert fortress
besieged by Rome
for over a year then
breached by ramp
to the death of all but a single
witness and child.
Never again.
Not just never forget, but
never again .