Redacted—The Poetry Bibliography

Redacted—The Poetry Bibliography by Terence Pitts is covered by Creative Commons License 4.0, CC BY-NC-ND, which enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for non-commercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.

Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Books With Redacted Poetry
3. Articles About Redacted Poetry
4. Books About Redacted Poetry
5. Redacted Novels
6. Internet-Only Resources
7. Key Artists & Artworks Using Redacted Texts

1. Introduction

There is a rich tradition in the English language going back more than a half century of taking one text and creating new poetry by redacting words from that original source text through blackout, commercial white out products, or strikethrough, by obscuring, erasing, or painting over words, or simply making some of the text to disappear. In this ever-expanding bibliography, I try to bring together all serious works of poetry that fall under the genre of redaction poetry. I will also include a selection of essays on the genre, a listing of online-only erasure projects, examples of redacted novels, and key examples of works of art that use redaction on texts.

Just to be clear, I have not physically handled many of the books listed here but I have almost always seen pages reproduced online. If I haven’t seen pages of the book, I have read reputable reviews that have convinced me that the title belongs in this bibliography. I try to be obvious about what I know and do not know about books and I try to give at least one online source where at least one page from a book or poem can be seen. Usually, a little bit of Internet searching will reveal more about many of these works.

If you are aware of something that you think should be included in this bibliography, leave me a comment. But it’s my football, as they say, so we play by my rules. Just because someone wrote a poem using redaction, doesn’t mean it makes the grade.

Here, redaction is a concept, not a method. It means eliminating words from one text to create a new poem (or novel). The various methods used to redact words are:

Blackout. Blacking over the text so that it is usually (though not always) unseeable.
White-out. Using correction fluid of one brand or another to cover up text. Wite-out, Tipp-ex, Liquid Paper, etc.
Strikethrough. Sometimes done by hand with a pen or pencil, too.
Erasure. Physically erasing a text so that the effort of the erasing process and perhaps some of the text remains visible.
Painting over. Painting a picture (or something else) over text.
Palimpsest. Using dark and light or different colored typefaces to distinguish between the source text and the newly created poem. Both the old and new texts should be visible, if not legible.
Elimination. I use this term when the poet leaves a visible gap where text has been taken away. If the poet uses brackets to indicate where the missing text was, I will say so.
Other. There remain multiple other ways to disfigure text or make text illegible. Poets can type over a text again, they can smudge text, blur it, smear it, etc. I’ll try my best to explain what I see and, whenever possible, use the term the poet uses.
Compaction. Compaction is my way of saying that the poet has created a new poem using text from another source, but has left no visual clue behind that redaction has been used. There are no typographic markings or empty spaces.

Links. Whenever possible, I will try to include a link to a website where readers of this bibliography can see an example of at least one page from as many books as possible. The danger, of course, is that some of these links will inevitably disappear over time. If you find a broken link, feel free to let me know in a comment and I will try to find an alternative one.

Looking for a place to start? The broadest introduction to the concept of “erasure” is Robin Cote Lewis’ 50-minute talk and slideshow “The Race Within Erasure,” which she gave in Portland, Oregon on February 25, 2016. She introduces her audience to a number of works of redacted poetry and fiction, but she also expands the idea of erasure to remind us of how people of color have been erased, how history gets erased, and the role that the English language has played in erasing other languages, other voices. Lewis is eloquent and dynamic. Another place to go is this “The Weight of What’s Left [Out]: Six Contemporary Erasurists on Their Craft” inThe Kenyon Review KR Blog (November 6, 2012). It’s an excellent, long, roundtable discussion moderated by Andrew David King, with participation from writers Travis Macdonald, Janet Holmes, Srikanth Reddy, M. NourbeSe Philip, Matthea Harvey, and David Dodd Lee. Images of their book covers and some pages from a few of their books are shown.

Last updated: August 20, 2026.

2. Books With Redacted Poetry

This section of the bibliography includes both books entirely consisting of redacted poetry as well as books that might contain only a single redacted poem, plus everything in between. Works are listed in chronological order, and within each year, titles are listed alphabetically by author.

1970-1999

Tom Phillips. A Humument. Tetrad Press, 1973. This is the book that started it all and led to a publishing phenomenon. Phillips transformed W.H. Mallock’s 1892 novel A Human Document, largely by painting images over the original pages and outlining the texts that were to remain. A trade edition was issued in 1986.  According to the artist’s official website, after fifteen different versions and six editions published during his lifetime (Phillips died in 2022), every page of the original version had been transformed. What Phillips created out of Mallock’s novel is not necessarily poetry, but it is so often cited by poets that it can’t be ignored her. See, for example, this article and interview with Phillips by Andrew David King. See it all here.

Ronald Johnson. Radi os. Trifecta Press, 1977. Reprinted by Flood Editions 2005. An elaborate poetic near blackout of the first four books of an 1892 edition of John Milton’s paRADIse lOSt. A photograph of the first page of the first edition is here. The book is discussed in an article here.

d.a. levy. Scarab Poems. London: Writer’s Forum, 1978. This stapled book reproduces a collection of typescript layered concrete poems most of which created in 1967. Levy typed out his own poems and then either overtyped them and/or smeared them with black ink, so that they are mostly illegible. Several pages of the book may be seen here:

Jesse Glass. Man’s Wows. Black Mesa Press, 1982. A short collection of poems made by eliminating partial texts from John George Hohman’s 19th century book Pow-Wows, or Long Lost Friend: A Collection of Mysterious and Invaluable Arts and Remedies, for Man as Well as Animals, and leaving spaces indicating the location of the redactions. Published in a limited edition of 126 copies. The book may be seen, apparently in its entirety here, at the website of Duration Press, which apparently republished the title sometime between 1999 and 2009.

Jackson Mac Low. Representative Works: 1938-1985. Roof Books, 1986. This volume apparently includes his series “5 Biblical Poems,” in which he took passages from the Bible and, using a chance operation, selected words to be replaced by empty brackets. His typed Biblical poem “21.21.29., The 5th Biblical Poem (for 3 Simultaneous Voices) The 1st Biblical Play“ (1955) is an object owned by the Museum of Modern Art and can be seen here.

Stephen Ratcliffe. [where late the sweet]BIRDS SANG. O Books, 1988. Ratcliffe uses elimination to create new poems from sonnets by Shakespeare. His process is explained in a lengthy article here. The book is also discussed in an article here.

Armand Schwerner. The Tablets, I-XXVII. National Poetry Foundation, 1999. “The Tablets is the fictional restoration and analysis of an ancient Sumerian text, complete with scholarly notes, pictographs, debatable translations, and missing or lost passages.” (Library Journal) According to poet & blogger Christopher Patton, Schwerner uses “brackets, ellipses, squares, circles, squared circles, enlisted to mark the polyambience of what’s missing, or imagined to be. Though nothing is really missing, is the message, as I take it, of erasure practice.”

2000-2009

Anne Carson. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Random House, 2002. Carson’s translation of the fragments of Sappho’s poetry, in which she used what John D’Agata called “a blizzard of brackets” (Boston Review) to show missing sections, is frequently cited as a key example for poets as they find their own way through redacted poetry.

Jen Bervin. Nets. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003. Bervin takes all 150 of the Sonnets of William Shakespeare and creates new poems on a darker palimpsest over the originals, which are in a lighter typeface. A digital preview of the book may be seen here. The book is discussed in articles here and here.

Kent John Johnson and Alexandra Papaditsas. The Miseries of Poetry. Skanky Possum, 2003. Johnson called these poems “traductions” from the ancient Greeks. They are supposedly translations of poems from texts found in a palace in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1998. The poems, which are bawdy and sometimes gross, contain brackets that represent missing or undecipherable parts of the text. As one poems says: “[Gnawed away. Impossible to know if the poem ends here.]” This is borderline redaction, but seemed worthy of inclusion. Johnson writes about the book here and examples of the poems are shown.More poems are shown here.

Elisabeth Tonnard. Let us go then you and I. The Netherlands: Acquoy, 2003. Tonnard created a whiteout poem of approximately 60 pages in length from the T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” For each page Tonnard went back to the same 12 lines and created a new continuation of her poem. At Tonnard’s website, where many of the book’s pages may be seen, she says: “This book is written in white ink. It consists of poems that are all ‘tipp-exed’ (tipp-ex=whiteout).” She must mean that her original copies were created that way before being photographed for the book, because the photographs of the book on her website show no evidence of either white ink or tipp-ex. Furthermore, the book was printed in an edition of 250 + 3 AP.

Michael Koshkin. Parad e R ain. Washington, DC: Big Game Books, 2006. A chapbook published in an edition of 75 that apparently created poems through blackout from Milton’s Paradise Regaine.

Paul Klinger. Fescue. Dusie, 2006. A chapbook in which Klinger created a much, much shorter poem from  Philip James Bailey’s 19th century epic poem Festus. According to Wikipedia,” Festus was first published anonymously in 1839, and then expanded with a second edition in 1845. Bailey “ultimately extended to over 40,000 lines when the final edition was published in 1889.” Klinger used hand-drawn strike though lines, blackouts, and free-form lines that travel around the original text. Sample pages may be seen here.

Mary Ruefle. A Little White Shadow. Wave Books, 2006. Ruefle used white correction fluid to selectively paint over an 1889 book of the same name by Emily Malbone Morgan. The pages of the Wave Books edition appear worn and yellowed to give her book the look of a facsimile of the original. Parts of the book may be seen at the publisher’s website here. A discussion of her book may be found here.

Joshua Beckman, Anthony McCann, and Matthew Rohrer. Gentle Reader! Wave Books, 2007. Collaboratively written poems created through the eliminating of various Romantic era texts. Pages of the book may be seen at the publisher’s website here. The three poets discuss the book at length here.

Travis Macdonald. The O Mission Repo. Fact-Simile Editions, 2008. In this book, Macdonald redacted with black ink much of The 9/11 Commission Report, leaving a completely different text. The original text is still barely legible beneath. At one time, Fact-Simile Editions released an e-text version, which completely blacked out the original 9/11 text. An example of that version may be seen here. The book is discussed in an article here.

M. NourbeSe Philip. Zong!  Middleton, CT: Wesleyan & Mercury Press (Canada), 2008. A book-long poem composed by eliminating most of the words of the 1783 legal decision Gregson v Gilbert, in which 150 Africans aboard a slave ship were drowned so the ship owners could profit from insurance. An expanded edition was published in 2024 by Graywolf Press that included a new preface by the author and new essays by Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick. Philip leaves considerable space around the remaining words. The expanded edition is discussed here, which shows a sample page. Another discussion of the book is here.

Janet Holmes. MS OF M Y KIN. Shearsman, 2009. Holmes used some of Dickinson’s poems of 1861 and 1862 to create new poems of her own. The placement of words on the page reflect the omitted words, which cannot be seen at all. Holmes’ text hints at the Iraq war, which ran from 2003-2011, by eliminating words from the poems Emily Dickinson wrote during (but not directly about) the Civil War. A sample of the book may be seen here. The book is discussed in an article here.

Michael Stewart. Almost Perfect Forms. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009. The author doesn’t argue that his book is poetry, but I can’t ignore it. While Michael Stewart was reading Magdalena Tulli’s novel Dreams and Stories (Archipelago, 2004, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston), he noticed her frequent use of the conjunctions “or” and “and.” So he started mapping those words as they appeared on the pages of her book and saw that they seemed to form tiny “constellations.” Each page of Almost Perfect Forms shows the exact placement of the word “and ” as it appears multiple times on specific pages of Tulli’s book (with all of the other words redacted and absent) and with lines drawn between them to outline the constellation that Steward saw (i.e., Leo, Centaurus, Capricornus). Examples of the pages of his book may be seen here. Examples of the book’s pages superimposed over Tulli’s text may be seen here.

2010-2019

Amaranth Borsuk. Tonal Saw. The Song Cave, 2010. According to the artist’s website, Tonal Saw is a “chapbook -length poem in thirty parts uses language from a religious tract that was left on my doorstep ten years ago. Vertical slashes score the source text, sawing through the language of religious fervor to write a religion of poetry that worships language itself.” The vertical slashes show where words from the original text have been removed. It was issued in an edition of 100 copies and was, at one time, offered as a free download (but no longer). It is discussed here, with examples of the poems shown.

David Dodd Lee. Sky Booths In The Breath Somewhere: The ASHBERY ERASURE Poems. BlazeVOX Books, 2010. Lee makes new poems from John Ashbery’s originals through compaction, eliminating the original words and leaving no gaps that would mark their location. At the publisher’s website, the book’s first few poems may be seen, along with its “Notes On The Text,” in which Lee explains his entire process of making new poems out of Ashbery’s originals. The book is also discussed in an article here.

Nick Flynn. The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands. Graywolf, 2011. This book of poems includes “Seven Testimonies (redacted)” which apparently creates new poems through compaction out of the testimonies of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. According to a review in Prairie Schooner, “The endpapers show the redacted documents with the words that Flynn omits blacked out. The full texts of the depositions are reproduced in his notes at the back of the book.” The book and that poem is discussed here.

Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter. Of Lamb. McSweeney’s, 2011. Harvey erased text from a biography of the English essayist, A Portrait of Charles Lamb by David Cecil, into a warped retelling of the celebrated nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” No visual trace of the erasure’s source appears in her book for children and adults alike, though Harvey does credit the biography in her afterword. Line drawings by Porter. The book is discussed in an article here.

Brian Henry. Lessness. Ashanti. 2011. According to an article and interview with Andrew David King in the Kenyon Review KR Blog, some of the poems in Lessness use various forms of redaction and strike-through to show Henry revising his own poems. This subject is discussed at length in the article.

Philip Metres. Abu Ghraib Arias. Flying Guillotine Press, 2011. A chapbook in an edition of 200 copies, each of which were bound in paper made out of old military uniforms from the Combat Paper Project. Metres uses several forms of redaction in poems that are sourced from (according to his Afterword): a Standard Operation Procedure manual for Camp Echo at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp (thanks to WikiLeaks), the testimony of Abu Ghraib torture victims found in Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth, the words of US soldiers and contractors as found in Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris’ The Ballad of Abu Ghraib… the Bible, the Code of Hammurabi, various news stories and journalistic pieces. The book is discussed here and and greater length here, where several poems may be seen. The Arias were included in his 2015 book Sand Opera.

Srikanth Reddy. Voyager. University of California Press, 2011. Reddy selectively eliminated text from In the Eye of the Storm (1986), the memoir of Kurt Waldheim, Austrian politician and secretary-general of the United Nations, and built a new poem using the remaining words. No visual hint of Waldheim’s text remains. Reddy created some files about this book on June 15, 2016: “Process Samples” and “Notes on Process.” The book is discussed in an article here.

Bradley Harrison. Diorama of a People, Burning. Goldline Press/Ricochet Editions, 2012. A 21-page chapbook in which Harrison winnows away at his own poetry (to paraphrase the publisher). Thick white paint or correction fluid over typeset poetry. The book is printed in color. A page may be seen here.

Elisabeth Tonnard. We are small. Leerdam, The Netherlands: self-published, 2012. A book-length poem of nearly 70 pages created from a single short note that appears to be from her landlord complaining about garments hanging in front windows. For each page of her book, Tonnard went back to the same short note and created a new continuation of her poem. At Tonnard’s website, where many images of the book may be seen, she writes: “On each page the complete text of this letter is printed, but parts of it are tipp-exed, or made white (tipp-ex is the European word for what in the US is called whiteout).” In looking at Tonnard’s excellent photographs of her book’s pages, I have to say that it is impossible to see any hint of “the complete text of the letter” on every page or any tipp-ex.

Jordan Abel. The Place of Scraps. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2013. Much of this book is poetry created by extracting excerpts from Marius Barbeau’s two volume anthropological oeuvre, Totem Poles, published by the National Museum of Canada in 1950. Barbeau was an early-twentieth-century ethnographer whose work on various First Nations both helped to preserve aspects of their culture and destroy it. Abel belongs to Canada’s Nisga’a Nation. Abel’s text is laid out spatially, suggesting the presence of Barbeau’s unseen text. Some of Barbeau’s photographs are also included. There is a critical study of the book, which includes images of several of the book’s pages, here.

Christian Hawkey and Uljana Wolf. Sonne from Ort. Kookbooks, 2013. Between 1845 and 1846, Elizabeth Barrett wrote 44 sonnets to her future husband, the poet Robert Browning. These became known as Sonnets from the Portuguese, even though they were her original poems written in English. In 1908, the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke translated them into German. Hawkey and Wolf, also a married pair of poets (he’s American and she’s German), have made different new redacted poems out of all of Browning’s sonnets, his in English and hers in German. Their new versions of each sonnet face each other across the book’s gutter so that the reader can compare their versions. The redacted words are represented by what appears to be a hand-drawn, thin, wavery line, which occasionally becomes a group of five parallel lines, or sometimes merely dots. The book is given an excellent, lengthy review by Joshua Weiner here, which reproduces several of the book’s pages.

Genevieve Kaplan. settings for these scenes. Convulsive Editions, 2013. A chapbook in which Kaplan creates 13 untitled poems through a series of erasures from a single paragraph from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Kaplan eliminates Woolf’s words and sometimes letters from individual words, but she leaves white spaces to show the redactions. The language in each poem comes from a paragraph early in Chapter 8, which begins “But whose foot was he thinking of. . . ” Published in a limited edition of 125 copies. The book is discussed in an interview with the author here.

Amaranth Borsuk & Andy Fitch. As We Know. Subito, 2014. This is neither poetry nor novel, exactly. According to Borsuk’s website: As We Know “repositions erasure procedures at the origins of (rather than in response to) a published text. Here Amaranth Borsuk has taken Andy Fitch’s summer diary and reshaped 60 passages (formatted as daily calendar notations in homage to Robert Creeley’s A Day Book, with its cover design by Robert Indiana) into a new type of collective confessional/constructivist collage that brings her own voice into the text and foregrounds the tensions of authorship. Embracing Roland Barthes’ call for a ‘corrected banality,’ this project presents the most unmediated-seeming idiom ‘the diurnal, journalistic record’ as itself the consequence of methodical and/or whimsical extraction. Nonfiction subjectivity emerges as the product of, not just the source for, erasure poetics. As in Barthes’ own elided memoirs, the resulting work calls into question exactly who we are and what we know.” Pages may be seen here and here.

Matthea Harvey. If the Tabloids Are True What Are You? Graywolf Press, 2014. Harvey’s hybrid book contains photographs and a variety of texts, including a white-out redaction of Ray Bradbury’s classic science fiction short story “M is for Martian.” According to Rachel Trousdale in a discussion of the book in the Harvard Review Online, Harvey presents “the erasure literally—as photographs of pages of the original book modified with white-out.”

Austin Kleon. Newspaper Blackout. Harper Perennial, 2014. Poems created by blacking out words on newspaper pages. Kleon writes about his history and process of making blackout poetry here.

Philip Metres. Sand Opera. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2015. The title Sand Opera is redacted from Standard Operating Procedure, a manual for Camp Echo at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. This book includes the “Abu Ghraib Arias,” which were published separately in 2011 as a chapbook (see the discussion above for details), along with several other poems that included redaction in several forms.

Collier Nogues. The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground. Drunken Boat, 2015. The poems redact text from historical documents related to the development and aftermath of the Pacific War, especially on the island of Okinawa. Nogues uses various redaction techniques in different poems. Using QR codes in the book, each poem can be linked to an interactive version at the book’s companion website (see below), where readers can explore original documents, which range from government documents and political manifestos to travel narratives, blockbuster adventure fiction, and science writing. The companion online version located here, often shows both the new poem and the original documents from which Nogues lifted the words. At the website, readers are told: “This website is the companion to a book of poems, and together they are a hybrid of poetry and digital art. As you move your finger (on a touchscreen device) or a mouse (on a conventional computer) from line to line of the poem, the original document’s erased text will reappear, then fade out again. Each poem’s original document can be found online through a link at the bottom of the poem’s page.”  I found that the original document’s text did not consistently appear when summoned by my mouse’s pointer, but otherwise this is a model for others to follow.

David Dodd Lee. And Others, Vaguer Presences: A Book of Ashbery Erasure Poems. BlazeVOX Books, 2016. A book of poems created by eliminating words from poems by John Ashbery, who is quoted on the back cover saying “It’s a strange feeling, being twice removed from one’s poems, strange and refreshing. I highly recommend Lee’s versions of the poem’s poems.” Lee leaves empty spaces at his erasures, as can be seen at the Amazon preview for it.

Robin Coste Lewis. Voyage of the Sable Venus: And Other Poems. Knopf, 2016. The title poem in this volume is nearly eighty pages long and is comprised solely of “the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present.” Wherever artists, curators or institutions had updated descriptions of nineteenth century works with modern terms such as “African American,” she “re-erased” those terms and inserted “historically specific markers” such as “slave, colored and Negro.” “I re-corrected the corrected horror in order to allow that original horror to stand.”  So, the poem might be thought of as an act of simultaneous redaction and replacement. A section of the poem may be read here.

Alicia Cook. Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2016. Cook redacts her own poems. As of 2026, Cook has four books of poetry out that she describes as being “…written in the style of an old mix tape.” After all her poems are printed in a section she refers to as “Side A,” she reprints each one again in the “Side B” section, creating new poems through selective black-out redaction. Sorry I Haven’t Texted You Back (2020), The Music Was Just Getting Good (2025) and More Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately (2026).

Solmaz Sharif. Look. Graywolf, 2016. Look contains the poem “Reaching Guantánamo,” which is comprised of seven short imaginary letters that Sharif wrote from the perspective of the wife of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Guantánamo detainee. In this poem, Sharif re-creates the censoring that Hamdan’s outgoing letters to his wife were subject to, deleting words from her imagined “letters” to him. Sharif is, therefore, redacting imaginary documents. I don’t know what form of redaction she uses in the book. The poem may be read here.

Jordan Abel. Injun. Talon Books, 2017. According to the publisher’s website: “Composed of text found in western novels published between 1840 and 1950 . . .Injun then uses erasure, pastiche, and a focused poetics to create a visually striking response to the western genre. After compiling the online text of 91 of these now public-domain novels into one gargantuan document, Abel used his word processor’s ‘Find’ function to search for the word ‘injun.’ The 509 results were used as a study in context: How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What was left over once that word was removed? Abel then cut up the sentences into clusters of three to five words and rearranged them into the long poem that is Injun. The book contains the poem as well as peripheral material that will help the reader to replicate, intuitively, some of the conceptual processes that went into composing the poem.” There is a review of the book here, which gives a good idea of the various ways in which texts appear on its pages.

Douglas Luman. The F. Text. Inside the Castle, 2017. From the publisher’s website: The F Text is an “erasure of Marco Polo’s travels in their various literary iterations.” But in his book, Luman makes it clear that his text is derived from several source texts in addition to The Travels of Marco Polo. In a note at the end of the book, Luman reminds us that Marco Polo’s text was dictated to another man (Rustichello da Pisa) while he was serving a prison sentence. Then, Lumen writes: “Enter Calvino, Coleridge, men named Rustichello, Purchas, and Donn-Byrne, centuries of translators . . .” Italo Calvino was the wonderful 20th century Italian writer, famous for his own Marco Polo-like novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. The Englishman Samuel Purchas published his own volumes of world travels in the early 17th century. And Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne was an early 20th century Irish writer whose novels included Messer Marco Polo. The F Text, thus, is apparently comprised of selections from all of the aforementioned works, which is why several typefaces and font sizes are used. There are no indications of the specific origin of any word or phrase. So, I would say that The F Text was not technically created through redaction, but through an accumulation of quotations from at least four different texts.

Layli Long Soldier. Whereas. Graywolf, 2017. A lengthy portion of Whereas is a three-part prose poem “Whereas Statements” in which Long Soldier, an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, takes on the official “apology” offered by the Obama administration to Native peoples. Part one of the poem quotes a paragraph from the government’s apology with the word “apologizes” repeatedly redacted, using brackets to show the empty spaces. In other parts, brackets are used to show words that are redacted and later gathered (brackets included) to create a new part of the poem. In portions of “Whereas” Long Soldier writes her own new series of Whereas statements. An example of this section may be seen here.

Chase Berggrun. R E D. Birds, LLC, 2018. According to the publisher’s description, R E D is “an erasure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A long poem in 27 chapters, R E D excavates from Stoker’s text an original narrative of violence, sexual abuse, power dynamics, vengeance, and feminist rage while wrestling with the complexities of gender, transition, and monsterhood.” There is an interview with Long Soldier here and an image of one page from the book. This image shows her using white-out to erase text from an original page of Dracula, although it is not clear that all of R E D is done in this manner.

Tracy K. Smith. Wade in the Water. Graywolf, 2018. Includes several redaction poems: “Declaration,” which removes words from the US Declaration of Independence; “The Greatest Personal Privation,” which does the same with letters about slave holding; and “Watershed,” which Smith explains is “a found poem drawn from two sources: a New York Times Magazine January 6, 2016, article by Nathaniel Rich entitled, ‘The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare,’ and excerpts of the narratives of survivors of near-death experiences as catalogued on http://www.nderf.org.” The latter poem may be read here. I don’t know how the poems appear in the book.

Billy-Ray Belcourt. NDN Coping Mechanisms. CBC Books, 2019.  Belcourt’s book includes a poem called “Treaty 8,” created by blacking out much of the text of the 1899 treaty between the Crown and thirty-nine First Nations spread across four western Canadian territories.

Eve L. Ewing. 1919. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019. Poems largely related to the Chicago race riots of 1919, with nine historical photographs of Black life in Chicago at that time that commissioned by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations for its 1922 report on the riots called The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot. The photographs depict the tense relations between Blacks and whites and the Federal troops called in to keep the peace. Ewing is a sociologist, writer, and professor at the University of Chicago. She also writes for Marvel Comics. Included in 1919 is a three-page poem “it wouldn’t take much,” which, Ewing writes, is “an erasure of an email I received from the management of my apartment building the day of the Jason Van Dyke verdict, October 2018.” For details on the police murder of Laquan McDonald and the trial of Officer Van Dyke, see here.

Robin Coste Lewis. Inhabitants and Visitors. Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, 2019. A chapbook created when Lewis was invited to participate as one of five artists in the Huntington’s exhibition “Beside the Edge of the World.” Coste create a compaction erasure poem derived from Henry David Thoreau’s written manuscript of Walden, which is housed in the Huntington’s archives. On each spread, her poem is on the right page, while the left showcases some of the handwritten words from the manuscript. Examples of the pages may be seen here, where Coste also writes about her selection: Thoreau “included a chapter that explored the community of free Blacks living around Walden Pond long before he arrived. He titled this chapter ‘Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors.’ My poem below is an erasure of Thoreau’s chapter. Like Walden at the time of Thoreau’s experiment, for me this chapter contained a hidden call to the historical rediscovery of African American histories embroidering Concord, and hence, America. Therefore, in order to extend Thoreau’s experiment, I removed and rearranged several lines from Thoreau’s chapter in order to magnify, lyrically, the free black community that once lived there.” “Inhabitants and Visitors” is included as a section in Coste’s 2022 book of poetry and family photographs To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness.

2020-present

Philip Metres. Shrapnel Maps. Copper Canyon Press, 2020. This book of poetry that deals with first-hand experiences with the Israel/Palestine conflict, includes three photographic reproductions of pages from Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad which have been heavily redacted (lined-through by hand) to create brief poems.

Lauren Russell. Descent. Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020. Descent is a book-length poem/project about Russell’s heritage and her research into archives and the diary of her great-great-grandfather, who was a Captain in the Confederate Army. He fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves, one of whom was Russell’s great-great-grandmother. The book includes reproduced documents, photographs, text, poetry, and several redacted poems. Russell turns two short paragraphs excerpted from newspaper articles about the Negro Baseball League pitcher Jesse Hubbard into two untitled palimpsest redaction poems (page 61) and she creates another untitled poem using white out on a page of text from Emma Hayes History of Polk County (Texas), 1937 (page 90). This latter page may be seen here, where it is included in a limited edition, four-page preview of Descent that was issued by Oxeye Press in 2017. The white out is described as a “chalk erasure” here.

Sarah J. Sloat. Hotel Almighty. Sarabande Books, 2025. Sloat has reproduced about one-quarter of the original pages of Stephen King’s 1987 novel Misery and then she has redacted his original text through pretty much every method possible, leaving her own poems behind. On top of each page, she has collaged playful imagery. Examples of pages may be seen here and here.

Carrie Olivia Adams. Be the thing of memory. Tolsun Books, 2021. Be the thing of memory is composed of four long poems built through redacting four different texts: 1) the autobiography of Sophia Tolstoy; 2) writings on and by Sarah Hackett Stevenson and Alice Magaw (two of the earliest women in medicine in the United States, the latter is the so-called “Mother of Anesthesia”) ; 3) an auditory testing guide, “The Revised Speech Perception in Noise Test”; 4) and a mid-century girl scout handbook. These poems appear to have been written by eliminating the redacted words as well as the resulting empty spaces. A bit from the first section called “Daughter of a Tree Farm” can be seen here. Adams discusses the book and her poetry here.

Paul Hlava Ceballos & Quenton Baker. Banana [        ] / we pilot the blood. The Third Thing, 2021. A A tête-bêche book consisting of two redacted works. 1) Assembled from the Senate document detailing the 1841 revolt of enslaved people transported aboard the brig Creole, Quenton Baker’s “we pilot the blood” considers the position of Blackness and the ongoing afterlife of slavery. 2) Paul Hlava Ceballos’s “Banana [ ]” collages declassified CIA documents, corporate reports, horticultural papers and personal accounts into a bloody portrait of multinational exploitation. The poems are accompanied by “a critical/contemplative interval conducted by writer and scholar Christina Sharpe in conversation with artist Torkwase Dyson’s ‘hypershapes’.”

Nazifa Islam. Forlorn Light: Virginia Woolf Found Poems. Shearsman, 2021. Islam used paragraphs from Virginia Woolf’s novels The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway to form new poems. Examples of the poems compared to their original texts may be found here, but I don’t know how the poems appear in her book.

Jonah Mixon-Webster. Stereo (TYPE). Knopf, 2021. The fourth and last section of Mixon-Webster’s book is dedicated to poems about the crisis that occured in 2014 in Flint, Michigan when 140,000 residents were exposed to lead in the city’s drinking water. His poem “Recovered_Conversation_0105.wav” blacks out “names that have been redacted to protect the ill-informed,” according to the poem. The poem appears as a conversation amongst people whose names are blacked out.

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth. Her Read: A Graphic Poem. Texas Review Press, 2021. Steinorth took a copy of Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art that she purchased at a library book sale and completely altered it. The text has been selectively inked over to create a new one, while She often painted on or over the images of artworks in the book. According to a note in the book, Steinorth used “correction fluid, archival inks, florist tissue, window shades, leather, general purpose thread, dress cloth, embroidery floss” in the original, which was then photographed to create the Texas University Press edition. The book is reviewed here, where a few pages may be seen.

Clare Didden. Ore Choir. Tupelo Press, 2022. Didden used as her source texts various archives on historic volcanoes in Iceland. There are two styles of redacted poetry in Ore Choir. In the first, colorful images created by Kevin Tseng are overlaid on the source texts, with results that somewhat resemble Tom Phillip’s Humument. Then there are simply the poems created from words highlighted in each image. Didden discusses the process of making the images here. More about her work can be seen at her website.

Chloe Honum. The Lantern Room. Tupelo Press, 2022. The poem “St. Mary’s Home for Unwed Mothers in Ōtāhuhu, Auckland” is the second half of a diptych of poems about an organization accused of abducting the babies of unwed mothers and adopting them out. The poem was created by eliminating text from the website of the history section of the Anglican Trust for Women and Children’s. Part (or all?) of the poem may be seen here. I don’t know how it appears in the book.

Charles Jensen. Instructions between Takeoff and Landing. University of Akron Press, 2022. Contains the “Poem in Which Words Have Been Left Out,” which eliminates various words from the Miranda Warning that resulted from the 1966 US Supreme Court ruling. The poem may be read here. I don’t know how it appears in the book.

Robin Coste Lewis. To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness. Knopf, 2022. This massive book of poetry and family photographs contains two compaction redacted poems. For the first, see: Robin Coste Lewis. Inhabitants and Visitors. 2019 (above). The second is “The Process,” derived from James Baldwin’s essay “The Creative Process.”

Quenton Baker. Ballast. Haymarket Books, 2023. The first 94 pages of Ballast reproduce very heavily blacked out pages of Senate Document 51 of the Second Session of the 27^th Congress in 1842. This document deals with the revolt on a slave ship Creole that held 135 American-born slaves who rebelled and were able to escape. According to Baker, it was the only large-scale revolt of that nature that “did not end in capture, torture, or capital punishment.” The Senate document deals only with letters between US and British consulates in the Bahamas and sworn depositions from the Creole’s white crew. There was no testimony from any of the 135 Black Americans. The second half of Ballast is a long poem by Baker in which he attempts to speak for the 135. Baker discusses the book in an interview here. The project was turned into an exhibition at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum in 2018-19, as can be seen here.

Leslie Sainz. Have You Been Long Enough at Table. Portland: Tin House, 2023. Her poem “Massive Activity” uses blackout redaction and “engages with real and manipulated text from declassified documents that outline Operation Mongoose and Operation Northwoods—two covert projects masterminded by the Pentagon that sought to incite a counterrevolution and/or assassinate Fidel Castro,” according to the book’s Notes.

Erin Marie Lynch. Removal Acts. Graywolf Press, 2023. In the middle of the rigidly rectangular prose poem “Removal Act,” there is a white rectangle that reads only: “©THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM / USING THIS IMAGE: SORRY, THIS IMAGE IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD.” The photograph that Lynch “redacted” is actually portrait of her great great great grandfather, Mato Sabi Ceya, which was made in Washington, D.C., after he was forced to sign a treaty with the US government after being threatened with his life. The British Museum’s claim of copyright and its technical command over downloading the image force Lynch and her family to “screenshot the image, print it with shitty inkjets.” Her poem “To Go There,” also quotes some strikethrough lines of redacted poetry from Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017), which she turns into double-line strikethroughs. Her book is discussed here.

Nicole Sealey. The Ferguson Report: An Erasure. Knopf, 2023. Contains eight short poems created out of the 105-page report done by the US Department of Justice’s report into the 2014 police killing of the unarmed young Black man Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Sealey uses palimpsest; the report is shown in very faint type, while her new poem consists of the few unredacted words in darker type. Pages 1-4 of the poem may be seen here.

Hadara Bar-Nadav. The animal is chemical. Four-Way Books, 2024. This book of poetry includes an unknown number of drug-pamphlet redaction poems such as “[Infect this page],” which can be seen here. It is not clear how the poems appear in the book. According to Amazon, she draws on “her own experience as a medical editor and her family’s history of Holocaust survival to write into the hybrid legacy of Western medicine.”

Joaquín Zihuatanejo. Occupy Whiteness. Deep Vellum Publishing, 2024. According to the publisher’s website: “Occupy Whiteness is a collection of hybrid erasure poems. Starting from long-form works of literature by straight, white men, Joaquín Zihuatanejo occupies their pages, erasing words and sections, leaving only his poetry behind—the white space that remains becoming colonized Brown verse.” A sample poem may be seen here.

John Bevis. A Surrey Naturalist. Uniformbooks, 2025. The poems in this collection are sourced from Eric Parker’s Surrey Naturalist (1952). On his website, Bevis describes at length the nearly random process by which he turned Parker’s book into poems: “The cutout is an A5 piece of card, with a central rectangle about the size of a matchbox removed. It is placed on the page and slid like a ouija glass over the text until words and combinations of words framed in the cutout begin to free themselves from their context and nudge the attention towards new associations, new suggestions of meaning or wordplay. It’s a technique used more often in the 1960s and ’70s.” Pages from the book may be seen here.

Elizabeth Bradford. SOFAR. Persea, 2025. Contains the poem “Lesson VIII: Map of North America,” which is redacted from “Smith’s Quarto, or Second Book in Geography, 1848, p. 17.” That poem may be seen here. SOFAR includes “Lesson III: The Divisions, Illustrated,” which might also be a redacted poem, but I cannot tell. I don’t know how these poems appear in the book.

Aaron Coleman. Red Wilderness. Four Way Books, 2025. Contains his poem “South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills,” which eliminates text from W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “Of the Wings of Atalanta,” from The Souls of Black Folk. That poem may be seen here. I don’t know how this poem appears in the book.

brittny ray crowell. Cord Swell. Norton, 2025. Crowell’s book contains a poem “Nurse’s Log,” which, according to the poet’s notes in the book “begins as an erasure of the actual notes taken by hospice caretaker Patricia Williams on the day of my grandmother’s death.” It is a palimpsest poem, using light and dark typefaces. The book also has a redaction prose poem “Halloween 2016,” in which she redacts her own poem twice, each time reducing it further. The second redaction contains only twelve words. Each redaction seems to make the poem appear less dark and mysterious.

Rachel DuPlessis. The Complete Drafts. Coffee House Press, 2025. DuPlessis began writing the cantos that she calls “The Drafts” in 1985 and the first few were published in 1987. This publication, 114 cantos over 984 pages in two volumes, collects all of them for the first time. Some of the cantos, perhaps only a small number, use blackout within them, but they represent something very important to what DuPlessis thinks of as a single poem. Apparently, there are notes accompanying each of cantos which identify the source materials for the redactions. For a (much) deeper dive into her use of redaction, I highly recommend this essay by C.J. Martin, which comes with the warning that he is fond of the vocabulary of literary theory. “Draft 99: Intransitive” may be seen here.

Remi Recchia. Aphorism | Paroxysm. Fifth Wheel Press, 2025. From the publisher’s website: “An investigation of the interplay between the Abrahamic religious tradition and a contemporary understanding of transmasculinity. . . through tweet screenshots and blacked-out Bible verses.”

Sarah J. Sloat. Classic Crimes. Sarabande Books, 2025. Sloat has taken pages from some of the books by William Roughead, who wrote true crime stories and books for six decades beginning around 1889. She has redacted his original text through a variety of means to create her own poems. On top of each page, she has collaged playful imagery.

Andrew Brenza. Et Al. Unsolicited Press, 2026. According to the publisher’s website, Et Al was “carved from the bones of a discarded dark fantasy novella and reborn as an experimental epic.” It is a palimpsest poem, “etched from the eternal dark,” which seems to be Brenza’s own discarded novel. Some words are also blacked out completely. In the Amazon preview, several full page “illustrations” interrupt the text. One looks like a mysterious microscopic image, while the others involve overlaid, illegible texts.

3. Articles About Redacted Poetry

In this section you will find selected general articles on the subject of redacted poetry, along with articles that discuss work by multiple poets. This is not intended to be a comprehensive listing of articles about the topic; I don’t want to waste reader’s time by sending you to articles that don’t add something new to the conversation.

Travis Macdonald. “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics.” Jacket 38 (Late 2009).

C. J. Martin. “How To Mourn-Touch: The redactive prosodies of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.” Jacket2 December 14th, 2011. Martin’s lengthy essay on DuPlessis’ very, very long poem The Drafts (2025), which she began writing in 1985, traverses a wide expanse of territory as he writes about her use of redaction. If you have a high tolerance for the vocabulary of literary theory, I recommend this essay for his deep dive into the ramifications of redaction in poetics.

Jeannie Vanasco. “Absent Things as if They Are Present: A History of Literature Created by Erasure, Collage, Omission, and Wite-Out.” The Believer 86 (January 2012).

Andrew David King. “Touching with the eye, seeing with the hand: erasure as reading experience.” The Kenyon Review KR Blog September 12, 2012. In this essay, King discusses two works of redacted poetry that preserve a crucial element of the source text besides its individual words: the placement of those words on the page: Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (1977) and Janet Holmes’s The Ms of M Y Kin (2009).

Andrew David King. “Stitching shut the holes: on concealed erasure.” The Kenyon Review KR Blog September 16, 2012. In this essay, King discusses three works of redaction that don’t preserve the spatial aspects of their source texts: Matthea Harvey’s Of Lamb (2011), David Dodd Lee’s Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere (2010), and Dan Beachy-Quick’s This Nest, Swift Passerine, which is a collage-text, not an example of redacted poetry.

Andrew David King. “Shakespeare’s body, Shakespeare’s ghost: erasure, canonicity, and the apophatic self.” The Kenyon Review KR Blog September 22, 2012. In this lengthy essay, King discusses several poets who “rewrite” Shakespeare in one way or another, including two who use redacted poetry: Jen Bervin’s Nets (2003), Stephen Ratcliffe’s [where late the sweet]BIRDS SANG (1988).

Andrew David King. “Politics, erasure, and a ‘sometimes genuine music’.” The Kenyon Review KR Blog October 25, 2012. In this essay, King writes at length about two examples of redaction poetry: Srikanth Reddy’s book Voyager (2011) and Travis Macdonald’s book The O Mission Repo (2008).

Andrew David King. “The Weight of What’s Left [Out]: Six Contemporary Erasurists on Their Craft.” The Kenyon Review KR Blog November 6, 2012. An excellent, long, roundtable discussion with Travis Macdonald, Janet Holmes, Srikanth Reddy, M. NourbeSe Philip, Matthea Harvey, and David Dodd Lee, with images of their book covers and some pages from a few of their books.

Joshua Weiner. “Sonne from Ort.” Body Literature April 12, 2013. Weiner’s review of Sonne from Ort
by Christian Hawkey and Uljana Wolf breaks my rule that reviews of a single book shouldn’t be listed here, but it’s such an excellent piece about redaction poetry in general that I couldn’t exclude it.

Amaranth Borsuk. “The POD People.” Jacket2, August 22nd, 2013. She discusses the use of pre-existing books and printing-on-demand (POD) to create new works, some of which use erasure of the original text through various means. An example is Yedda Morrison’s Darkness (2012), which erased much of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, leaving behind “only references to the natural world.”

Genevieve Kaplan. “‘Destroying’ the Text To Create a Poem.” Post45, 10.02.14. Author of the redacted book settings for these scenes (2013), Kaplan writes about a number of other books of redacted poetry from the perspective of a working poet.

Jennifer S. Cheng. “Erasure poetry: A revealing (i).” Jacket2, September 1, 2016. Part of Cheng’s multi-part discussion on the “poetics and politics of refraction.” “Erasure as an artistic form carries with it an urgent complexity of politics and ethics. Perhaps it is always inherently a political act.”

Jennifer S. Cheng. “Erasure poetry: A revealing (ii).” Jacket2, September 8, 2016. A continuation of her discussion in Jacket2 on September 1, along with a discussion of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008).

Rachel Stone. “The Trump-Era Boom in Erasure Poetry.” The New Republic October 23, 2017.

Raphael Rubenstein. “Missing: erasure ‎| ‎Must include: erasure.” sous rature / under erasure: An exhibition curated by Heather + Raphael Rubinstein at Pierogi Gallery. An exhibition held from November 28, 2018 – January 27, 2019 in New York City. Rubinstein gives a brief overview of erasure in art and poetry, then discusses examples of how it has been used in recent decades in a wide variety of ways that address politics and race. He argues for the precedents and the reasons for erasing the distinctions between art and literature. And he addresses the fact that so much erasure (especially in literature) involves the appropriation and even the “assassination” of someone else’s property.

Cecily Park. “On Erasure.” The Kenyon Review XIII, Number 4 (July/August 2020). Parks writes about her experience beginning and then dropping a project of erasing American botanical artist Anne Ophelia Dowden’s book Wild Green Things in the City: A Book of Weeds (1972). Parks writes: “I shelved my erasure project because I have not made peace with the process of erasure, the ways in which it has, ultimately, disenfranchised women artists and writers. I am no longer confident that erasure provides a gateway to reading and recovering the erased writer’s work, though I once was, or thought I was. I have not found a way to make my erasure of Dowden’s work feel like a necessary destruction of the world of her book, a world where common knotweed and white clover grow in abandoned lots or out of the cracks of grimy sidewalks, where I can encounter ‘a milkweed shoot breaking through an asphalt driveway by its sheer urge to be alive[.]’.”

Christina M. Rau. “Your Guide to Blackout Poetry.” Bookriot.com August 6, 2021. How to teach and how to create blackout poems, including the use of digital blackout apps. She points to several well-known examples of blackout poetry.

Muriel Leung. “Erasure in Three Acts: An Essay.” Poetry Foundation November 1, 2021.

Leigh Sugar. “On Erasure.” Poetry Foundation July 22, 2022. An article that is partly about using erasure as a teaching technique.

Max Liu. “What Isn’t Said: How American writers are using erasure and redaction to expose power.” ArtReview February 2 2024.

4. Books About Redacted Poetry

Mary Ann Caws & Michel Delville. Undoing Art. Quodlibet, 2017. A short book (66 pages) in the form of a conversation between Caws and Delville, who are both scholars and writes interested in the intersection of literature and the visual arts. “Undoing,” to them, is all manner of art that uses “destruction, disfiguration and obliteration of work by the artists and/or by that of others.” Thus, undoing is broader than the way I use the term “redaction,” but their conversation (and the chapters of the book) revolve around methodologies for undoing, many of which overlap with my methodologies for redaction, such as erasure, blackout, and so on. The conversational approach seems to limit the amount of academic language and theory-speak. A very enjoyable book to read.

Lisa Min, Franck Billé, and Charlene Makley, eds. Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State. Punctum, 2024. Redacted spans various “human endeavors,” including the worlds of international politics and the arts via eighteen essays. “We thus take up redaction as a way of coming to terms with both power and complicity, desire and disavowal, since it is first and foremost a procedure of the state that we appropriate but also emulate. And so, redactions come to mark the negative space in which political power and the aesthetic experience of that power is as seductive as it is menacing, unruly as it is generative.” Most of the essays in this 285-page volume approach the subject from a geopolitical perspective. It also includes 18 poems and illustrations of works using redaction in various ways. Also available as a free pdf e-book from the publisher’s website.

5. Redacted Novels, Etc.

Tom Phillips. A Humument. Tetrad Press, 1973. see his entry under 2. Books With Redacted Poetry above.

Ted Berrigan. Clear the Range. Adventures in Poetry, 1977. According to Berrigan’s son Edmund, “The book had been made by crossing out words and letters in a western pulp novel—Twenty Notches by Max Brand. The result is a western-themed metaphysical odyssey.” This was published by the poet Larry Fagin and David Rosenberg, then an editor at Coach House Press. According to Ted Berrigan: An Annotated Checklist, “Berrigan altered by ‘writing through’ in different-colored inks.” In Berrigan’s novel, apparently, there is no sign that any redaction has taken place.

Claude Closky. 1634, 1994. The French artist took a paperback copy of 1984 by George Orwell, retitled it 1634, and completely lined the entire text with ball-point pen. The book may be seen here.

Ann Hamilton. tropos. Dia Center for the Arts, 1995. From October 17, 1993 through June 19, 1994, the artist Ann Hamilton held a performance/installation at the Dia Center for the Art that involved (among other elements) 48 individual readers who sat continuously at a desk during open hours. The floor of the Center was covered by waves of horsehair. Each reader silently read the text of a book as he or she burnt it away using a handheld electric burner. The 48 books were ones they had chosen from a selection that Hamilton had purchased from The Strand, New York’s famous secondhand bookstore. She chose books solely on several physical criteria: they would have neither chapter headings nor headers or footers—therefore, there were no indications of chapter title or authorship at the top and bottom of the page, so that visitors could not immediately know what was being read. They would have to look closely at the book or the reader’s mouth to discern the words. Several were obviously novels. The project is described here and more images may be seen here.

Jen Bervin. The Desert. Granary Books, 2008. Bervin had machine-sewn in blue thread lines that zig-zagged across every bit of text for all 130 pages of a newly reprinted version of John Van Dyke’s The Desert (1901). The book was published in a limited edition of 40 copies. Pages of the book may be seen here.

Rob Fitterman. The Sun Also Also Rises. Calgary: No Press, 2008. Fitterman has created “a parallel companion” to Hemingway’s novel keeping only the sentences that begin with the word “I” and erasing everything else. His novel is greatly compacted so that chapters are often only a single short paragraph long. It may be read on his website here.

Jérémie Bennequin. Erased Proust Writing. see his entry under 6. Internet-Only Resources below.

Damion Searls. ; or The Whale. Review of Contemporary Fiction XXIX, special issue, Summer 2009. This wonderfully strange effort essentially constitutes the unerasure of a text. From the author’s website: “In 2007, Orion Books produced Moby-Dick in Half the Time, a Compact Edition ‘sympathetically edited’ to ‘retain all the elements of the originals: the plot, the characters, the social, historical and local backgrounds and the author’s language and style.’ Offended by that abridgement, Searls decided to restore everything Orion Books erased. From the publisher’s website: “; or The Whale is an abridgment that preserves the elements missing from that list—digression, texture, weirdness—by keeping every chapter, word, and punctuation mark of Melville’s original Moby Dick; or The Whale that was removed from the Orion’s edition.”

Jonathan Safran Foer. Tree of Codes. Visual Editions, 2010. His novel uses cut-outs to create a book-length erasure from The Street of Crocodiles (1933) by Bruno Schulz to tell a new story of the last day of one person’s life.

Holly Melgard. The Making of Americans. Troll Thread, 2012. Melgard reduces Steins infamous 925-page novel to less that 32 pages by deleting every word that repeated in Stein’s original text. Melgard, who felt that Stein’s book was called “unreadable” because it was so repetitive, said: “Now ‘there is no such thing as repetition’ in The Making of Americans, because I deleted it.” The book is discussed briefly here. It can be downloaded as a pdf for free here.

Yedda Morrison. Darkness. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2012. Morrison whites out the Signet Classic mass paperback version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, leaving behind only the words and phrases that, in her view, reference the natural world. An E-book version was published at some time by Little Red Leaves and Chapter 1 may be seen here, although the e-book seems to no longer exist.

Jordan Abel. Un/inhabited. Talon Books, 2015. From the publisher’s website: “Abel constructed the book’s source text by compiling in their entirety ninety-one western novels found on the website Project Gutenberg, an online archive of works whose copyright has expired. Using his word processor’s Ctrl-F function, he searched the compilation for words that relate to the political and social aspects of land, territory, and ownership. Each search query represents a study in context (How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What is left over once that word is removed?) accumulating toward a representation of the public domain as a discoverable and inhabitable body of land.”

Russell Maret. Three Constitutions. Self-published, 2021. In this particular instance, I think a blackout version of the Constitution of the United States can safely be considered a novel. In the late 2010’s, Maret began “exploring ways in which I can make politically inspired work that is both consistent with my aesthetics, and meaningful without being preachy or self-righteous.” In the end, he decided that the perfect target for his frustrations was the Constitution. He “was inspired by the increasingly contentious conflict between ‘originalists,’ those who view the Constitution as a prescriptive cultural artifact delineating American civilization, and those who view the Constitution as a flexible instrument conceived to adapt to the evolving political, social, and racial realities of American nationhood.” Here’s the book’s description from the Center for Book Arts: “It consists of three volumes. The actual text of the constitution and amendments are set in a typeface that at first glance appears like an archaic alphabet but becomes legible as one reads. This volume is contained within an acrylic vitrine as it it is an inaccessible artifact. The two other volumes are the “interpretations.” One is a redacted version of the text that is inspired by the idea that most constitutional zealots get their information from biased news commentators which is similar to reading a redacted text. The other interpretation is inspired by the idea that the other primary source of constitutional information is the internet. For this volume the original text was translated via Google into Esperanto, from Esperanto into Russian, from Russian into Mandarin, and from mandarin back into English. The resulting text is what was printed.” On his blog, which uses many photographs, Maret discusses at length the process of making this book, which was limited to an edition of ninety copies. There are more detail on Maret’s website, where the book is priced at $5,250.

Russell Maret. The United States Constitution and Amendments, Redacted. Self-published, 2021. For those unable to afford the limited edition three-volume set above, Maret did an edition of 1,000 copies of the blackout redacted Constitution in the form of four newsprint broadsides for $10 each.

Graeme Hobbs. Oupire: A treatment, by excision, of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871-72). Hay-on-Wye: fallowpages, 2022. In addition to creating a new shorter short story from Sheridan Le Fanu’s original story, Hobbs also used two ink colors to distinguish what he saw as the “twin narratives” of the story. More about the book, including images of several pages, may be seen here. Printed in a limited edition of 72 copies.

Christina Sharpe. Ordinary Notes. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. This book is the reason there is an Etc. in the title of this category, which I originally thought would only encompass novels. But I couldn’t overlook the fact that Sharpe’s powerful and very original work of uncategorizable non-fiction had to be included. She uses black-out redaction throughout to remove offensive words (the n- word, usually) and pieces of personal identification.

James Elkins. A Short Introduction to Anneliese. Unnamed Press, 2025. In Elkin’s novel, Samuel Emmer has unwillingly inherited the 20,000+ page manuscript from the recently deceased Anneliese Glur. Before declaring it unreadable and walking away from it, he briefly skims and reads some of its pages, which are reproduced in the book. On several pages (pp. 441-446), she has mysterious redacted lines of her own manuscript apparently having to do with “multiple universes” by blacking them out completely.

Edwin Turner. “James Joyce’s Ulysses, but just the punctuation.” Biblioklept. June 16, 2026. For real!

6. Internet-Only Resources

Mary Ruefle. Marie. 2008. A redacted erasure of an original edition of Marie, by Laura E. Richards (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1894), with many photographs added. White, yellow, blue, and black paint or correction fluid is used to cover up the redacted text, along with pencil. The book has been rephotographed and can be clicked through page by page.

Mary Ruefle. The Mansion. 2008. A redacted erasure of an original edition of The Mansion by Henry Van Dyke (NY: Harper and Bros, 1911), with various types of illustrations added. White, yellow, blue, and black paint or correction fluid is used to cover up the redacted text. The book has been rephotographed and can be clicked through page by page.

Jérémie Bennequin. Ommage / Erased Proust Writing. I know that Proust isn’t in English or poetry, but everyone reads, or at least knows about, Proust. For more than ten years beginning in 2008, the French artist Jérémie Bennequin erased Marcel Proust’s Recherche du temps perdu. This resulted in exhibitions of the bottled eraser dust. The project is documented here. The French version is here. This was just too cool to pass up.

Genevieve Kaplan. The Forest and the Trees. From roughly 2011 until September 2016, Kaplan, a poet, publisher & educator, wrote the blog The Forest and the Trees “to keep an informal record of contemporary (and not so contemporary) found/altered/treated/appropriated books, paying particular attention to artists’ books, found-objects, literary constraint, and contemporary poetry & poetics.” Some of the titles from my bibliography resulted from scouring her informative blog. Unfortunately, many images no longer show up and numerous links are now broken. But it’s an important resource, nevertheless.

Dave Bonta. The Pepys Diary Erasure Project Since January 1, 2013, Dave Bonta has been conducting “a daily exercise in erasure poetry based on the 17th-century Diary of Samuel Pepys.” Using the Diary selection that appears online daily at The Diary of Samuel Pepys website, Bonta makes a selection of words from which he creates a poem. On Bonta’s website, a palimpsest version of Pepys’ daily diary entry with Bonta’s new poem overlaid in darker type is shown, and the new poem is condensed and shown by itself below that. From Bonta’s website: “It was my desire to read it day by day that led to this project, which I view not as erasure but as discovery—a kind of deep (mis)reading. Pepys was a sexual predator and an architect of British colonialism who personally profited off the slave trade, so any less than an engaged, critical reading of the diary, in this day and age, would be irresponsible. From a secret diary, these are the secret poems hidden even from the author himself.” Bonta has made several complete years of the Diary with his erased poems available as free PDF downloads at the website. (Think about this for a second; Bonta has created a redaction poem every day for over thirteen years.)

Amaranth Borsuk, Jesper Juul, and Nick Montfort. The Deletionist. thedeletionist.com. By The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text to uncover poems, discovering a network of poems called “the Worl” within the World Wide Web. The Deletionist takes the form of a JavaScript bookmarklet that automatically creates erasures from any Web pages the reader visits. Visit the website to read more about it and to use it.

Robin Coste Lewis. “The Race Within Erasure.” Literary Arts, February 25, 2016. Audio of Lewis’ talk. Her accompanying slideshow may also be viewed. “In this episode of The Archive Project, poet, scholar, and National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis focuses on a writing practice called ‘erasure’ which is essentially the act of creating a new work out of an existing one by deleting text. She gradually widens this lens to talk not only about erasure in literature, but about how history is recorded, remembered or erased; how the humanities are taught; which stories are published and read, and how this shapes our understanding of our society and our worldview. Throughout her talk, Lewis toggles between the past and present, celebrates writers both famous and obscure, challenges a cannon that is missing far too many writers of color, and surfaces ideas, stories and voices that are essential, especially right now.”

Niina Pollari. “Form N-400 Erasures” (2017) is a blackout poem based on the application for becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. It can be seen here.

sous rature / under erasure: An exhibition curated by Heather + Raphael Rubinstein at Pierogi Gallery. An exhibition held from November 28, 2018 – January 27, 2019 in New York City. It included many artists and a few poets. Examples by everyone in the exhibition may be seen online, along with an essay by Raphael Rubenstein, “Missing: erasure ‎| ‎Must include: erasure”. A pdf catalog of the exhibition can be downloaded here.

Laurel Chen , Niina Polari & Melissa Dunphy. “Form N-400 Erasure Songs for SATB Chorus,” 2023. Poetry based on the application for becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen by Laurel Chen, Niina Polari & Melissa Dunphy, followed by “N-400 Erasure Songs,” by Melissa Dunphy. Commissioned by Cantus and Arranged for the South Bend Chamber Singers. Mormolyoke Press, 2023. One elimination poem by each woman (two pages in length total), twenty pages of sheet music (12 minutes playing time). Polari’s poem is the same text as in her blackout version at nytyrant.com, but here it is turned into an elimination poem, with some token empty spaces. The project may be seen here.

Edwin Turner. “James Joyce’s Ulysses, but just the punctuation.” Biblioklept. June 16, 2026. Really!

7. Key Artists & Artworks Using Redacted Texts

In this category, I drew upon artworks from around the world.

Robert Rauschenberg. Erased de Kooning Drawing. 1953. Traces of drawing media on paper with label and gilded frame. Coll: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. OK, I know there isn’t any text in this, but it gets cited so frequently. When people think of redaction and artworks, this is what they tend to remember.

Gerhard Rühm. reduzierte zeitung (neue tageszeitung), 1962. The German artist painted over the title pages of the newspaper Neue Tageszeitung for six consecutive days, preserving only the word “und” (and).

Marcel Broodthaers, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard. Antwerp: Galerie Wide White Space, 1969. The artist Broodthaers redacted Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous 1897 poem entirely by covering every line with black stripes. He referred to his work as “an image,” rather than a new poem. See the illustration immediately above.

David Turner. Doris Cross Reworks 1968 1993. Museum of Fine Art, New Mexico, 1993. Exhibition catalog. The American artist Doris Cross is often looked upon as one of the originators of using redacted texts. Apparently even as early as 1965, she was making paintings and b&w photostats based on pages she reproduced from the 1913 Webster’s Dictionary, Secondary School Edition. Cross never considered the results of her work “poetry,” but her paintings were influential, nevertheless. There is an important 1981 interview with her here. Her work and influence are discussed and shown here.

Claude Closky. 1634, 1994. The French artist took a paperback copy of 1984 by George Orwell, retitled it 1634, and completely lined the entire text with ball-point pen. The book may be seen here.

Ann Hamilton. tropos. Dia Center for the Arts, 1995. From October 17, 1993 through June 19, 1994, the artist Ann Hamilton held a performance/installation at the Dia Center for the Art that involved (among other elements) 48 individual readers who sat continuously at a desk during open hours. The floor of the Center was covered by waves of horsehair. Each reader silently read the text of a book as he or she burnt it away using a handheld electric burner. The book was one they had chosen a book from a selection that Hamilton had purchased from The Strand, New York’s famous secondhand bookstore. She chose books solely on several physical criteria: they would have neither chapter headings nor headers or footers—therefore, there were no indications of chapter title or authorship at the top and bottom of the page, so that visitors could not immediately know what was being read. They would have to look closely at the book or the reader’s mouth to discern the words.

Claude Closky. La la la, 2005. In 2005, the French tore off sections of the French newspaper Liberation, blacked out all of the text in a single column below, and wrote in ball point pen at the top “La La La Chant de” (or “La La La Song of”). Several of these works may be seen here.

Jenny Holzer. Redaction Paintings and Silkscreens. 2005-ongoing. Paintings and silkscreen prints in black that redact government documents regarding the Iraq War. It is easy to find many photographs of these artworks on the Internet.

Ariana Boussard-Reifel. Between the Lines. 2007. The book the artist has used to create this artwork is titled Rahowa (Racial Holy War: This Planet is All Ours), published by a white supremacist hate group and used for home schooling. When the head of the group died, his books were put up for sale, Human Rights Watch bought the books, and gave them to artists to rework. The work, which consists of the book and a pile of all the excised words, has been exhibited in “Slash: Paper Under The Knife” at the Museum of Arts and Design, NYC and elsewhere. Photographs of it may be seen at the artist’s website.

Jenny Holzer. DonaldsArmy. 2023, 24k gold and red gold leaf and oil on linen, 147.3 x 111.8 x 3.8 cm. Holzer’s painting is an exact reproduction of a page from the congressional committee report on the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, enlarged and rendered in gold leaf and oils. The core of the painting shows two large black rectangles labeled REDACTED.