Ink Earl

By Susan Holbrook,

Book cover of Ink Earl

Book description

Shortlisted for the ReLit 2022 Poetry Award

ink earl takes the popular subgenre of erasure poetry to its illogical conclusion.

Starting with ad copy that extols the iconic Pink Pearl eraser, Holbrook erases and erases, revealing more and more. Rubbing out different words from this decidedly non-literary, noncanonical source text,…


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Why read it?

1 author picked Ink Earl as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I truly never thought I’d laugh out loud at an erasure poem. Then Ink Earl came along. Holbrook starts with a hundred copies of the original fifties ad pitch for the Pink Pearl eraser—get it yet?—and hacks away different parts of each, yielding a series of meditations and diatribes and bouts of spirited near-nonsense. The poems are consistently clever delights, and the project’s conceptual wholeness is icing on the cake.

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