Missouri Life October 2023

BOOKS

Remains A new book of erasure poems invites readers to reconsider a historic document with origins in Missouri. REVIEW Evan Allen Wood

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rasure poetry is created by taking an existing text and deleting words, phrases, or individual letters in order to form a new piece of writing. In The Ferguson Report: An Erasure , published in August, poet Nicole Sealey uses the relationship between the new or found lines with their source material to tremendous effect. Sealey’s book cre ates eight new erasure poems using as a source the US Justice Department’s “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” a document that was released in the wake of protests stemming from the shooting of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer in August 2014. The document, upon its release, made no shortage of national headlines and inspired nationwide calls for reform to policing practices. Now, nearly a decade after Michael Brown’s death and the protests that followed, Sealey’s book creates something new from the report. In Sealey’s book, the original text of the Justice Department report has been preserved, allowing the reader to see precisely which words, letters, and phrases were extracted to form the new text of the poems. Sealey’s chosen words and letters stand out in black text, gradually forming the lines of her poems, and lending a sense of discovery to the act of reading, which differs quite a bit from the usual way we consume language. Sealey’s poems confront their source material head on. These lines are replete with phrases readers will associate with the criminal justice system (“Anything you say can and will be,” or “Stop! Hands where I can see!”), including one poem that includes line after line of common phrases that include the word “force.” The poems also manage to wring the imagery of nature out of the report, creating some of the collection’s most astonishing lines, such as: “The animal,/out of nowhere, flees/seconds too late—a design/oversight assigned/to that particular beast.” The fact that the poems were assembled from a conspicuous historical document adds depth. The experience of reading them is rewarding both in isolation and in contrast to the document from which they were exhumed.

THE FERGUSON REPORT: AN ERASURE Nicole Sealey,

144 pages, poetry, hardcover, Knopf, 7 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches, $29.

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