Gentle Reader!
By Joshua Beckman, Anthony McCann, and Matthew Rohrer
(6x8.5 68pp, paperback)
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I was alive
Sometimes
I looked...
Gentle Reader! is a collaborative book of erasures of Romantic era texts by Joshua Beckman, Anthony McCann, and Matthew Rohrer.
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A book that perfectly encapsulates the contradictions and complexities surrounding the English Romantics is an erasure of their works: Gentle Reader!...If you think erasure is valuable as an exercise but lacks literary merit, then I strongly recommend this book. You will find surreal images, and straightforward but astonishingly expressed statements, evidence that erasure can achieve what Wordsworth called "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"...
Jeannie Vanasco, The Believer
Read an interview at the Kenyon Review with all three authors about Gentle Reader!. -
Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of many books, including The Lives of the Poems and 3 Talks (Wave Books, forthcoming 2018), The Inside of an Apple, Take It, Shake, Your Time Has Come, and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is editor-in-chief at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Micrograms, by Jorge Carrera Andrade, 5 Meters of Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) by Carlos Oquendo de Amat, and Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008) by Tomaž Šalamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He also co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books, 2015).
Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of Thing Music (Wave Books, 2014), I ♥ Your Fate (Wave Books, 2011), Moongarden (Wave Books, 2006) and Father of Noise (Fence Books, 2003). In addition to these three collections, he is one of the authors of Gentle Reader! (2007), a book of erasures of the English Romantics, along with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the University of California-Riverside's Palm Desert MFA program. He is the “Poet Laureate” of Machine Project and also teaches courses at the California Institute of the Arts.
Matthew Rohrer is the author of Surrounded by Friends (Wave Books, 2015), Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at NYU.
