A Pop creation myth. Photographs courtesy of Erin McKenny.

Mary Ruefle, the poet and essayist, also makes unique hand-altered books: she sources, from thrift shops and used bookstores, secondhand texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then she goes through the pages and deselects words, applying liquid correction fluid, gouache, or other methods of obliteration. What remains is a kind of excavated composition. Her erasure texts range from slapstick to the absurd, from the lyrical to a wry melancholy. Ruefle, who is based in Vermont, has been making erasures, which she illustrates with collages, almost daily since 1998. Usually working on two pages a day, she has completed more than one hundred and twenty-five erasures to date, a selection of which are now on view through September 6 at Poets House in Downtown Manhattan—and several of which we’re presenting here.

—John Vincler

An existential novelization of a bird, M, crashing into his own reflection.

Bored flowers.

Pages that read like a surrealist advertisement.

 

An apparent allusion to Kafka.

 

An homage to Bob Dylan.

 

An unorthodox understanding of the phrase butterfly kisses.

 

Reflections on the humble, even animal practice of reading.

 

On writing, or not writing, or holding your writing instrument, waiting.

 

And imagining a world after words …