Several of the following are erasure poems, meaning
they’re documents with their pieces plucked out, just as
some will call this the gone year, the long year, the glove
year, the unlove year. The key to constructive—& not
destructive—erasure is to create an extension instead of
an extract. It’s not erasure, but expansion, whereby we
seek the underwriting, the undercurrent beneath the
watered surface of the words. It is to keep the words from
drowning. Hereby the pen looks to enhance, evoke,
explore, expose the bodies, the truth, the voices that have
always existed but have been exiled from history & the
imagination. In this case, we erase to find.