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Highlights & Blackouts
Experience memory, art, and selfhood in process. Highlights & Blackouts takes poems full of cityscapes, dirty verve, wonder, and queer longing and carves out a history of shifting perspectives. Written over a 15-year period and paired with erasures completed years later, this collection interrogates experience and aesthetics with the help of music, images, and videos by the author and a wide circle of artists and friends. For the full project, visit the Highlights & Blackouts code-poem experience highlightsblackouts.mixlit.io.
40 pages, Paperback
Published July 5, 2023
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 8, 2024
Highlights & Blackouts by Heather Bowlan published by MIXLIT.IO, 2023
(review by Juliet Cook)
I'm one of those writers/readers who is not necessarily drawn towards erasure poems. Some of them I really enjoy, but many of them I don't, because they don't seem very personal or emotional to me and I'm drawn towards the personal and emotional.
With that said, I very much enjoyed this collection, which is personal and emotional in a uniquely multi-faceted sort of way. Bowlan erases her own poems, re-inventing the content and exploring the context, with the timeframe of the poems ranging from 2006-2022. Each poem has at least one erasure poem; many of them have two erasures; the collection is filled with .1's, .2's, and .3's, and in addition to the poetry, there's also collage art created by Bowlan.
As to how the timeframes are arranged in the collection, the years are mixed together and it feels like a poetic re-analysis of different parts of one's life. It feels like the erasure of a personal relationship. Wanting something to be real and last, but watching it change shape and fade away.
Wanting yourself to be real.
I want to be a real poem - now I'm an erasure - now I'm an erasure of an erasure - am I becoming something smaller?
Or am I becoming something more precisely aligned with myself - am I becoming a different variation of myself - am I getting closer to the real me?
We all interpret things differently, but my mind interpreted this collection as a thought provoking exploration about the erasure of relationships, the erasure of time, the erasure of different pieces of one's own self and one's own existence. Moving backwards and moving forwards in a self-created realignment filled with elements that one can't control but that one can reposition.
Relationships changing, failing, ending, dying. Aging. Impending death. Deterioration of elements that seemed meaningful. Past, present, time continually racing, flying, changing. Memories and remnants and re-evaluation of past time. What was, what will never be the same again, what sticks inside, what changes, gets crossed off, gets deleted or repositioned. What grows in its own directions.
Breaking and putting yourself back together in different pieces. Becoming (and poetically documenting) who you want to be now, before it's too late. It might change again anyway.
The end of this review is my own erasure/re-amalgamation of lines from this collection...
***
"... stale labyrinths - blur out the years - a gaggle of men - broken lovers - tomorrow morning's stupid naked fight - the stale curses of paper dolls in a cheap room - the slow incisions, the skull saved for later - a handful of hours, so many promises made, but a matter of days and - you reach, try to reach across - You could find it again - or is that just an area code from the past - they'll see me but they'll never see me - a tumbleweed swarm of sediment - Somebody bandage up my mouth before I spit out a bunch of rude tulips - the rules spilled - hot knives on the radiator - I won't give up..."
(review by Juliet Cook)
I'm one of those writers/readers who is not necessarily drawn towards erasure poems. Some of them I really enjoy, but many of them I don't, because they don't seem very personal or emotional to me and I'm drawn towards the personal and emotional.
With that said, I very much enjoyed this collection, which is personal and emotional in a uniquely multi-faceted sort of way. Bowlan erases her own poems, re-inventing the content and exploring the context, with the timeframe of the poems ranging from 2006-2022. Each poem has at least one erasure poem; many of them have two erasures; the collection is filled with .1's, .2's, and .3's, and in addition to the poetry, there's also collage art created by Bowlan.
As to how the timeframes are arranged in the collection, the years are mixed together and it feels like a poetic re-analysis of different parts of one's life. It feels like the erasure of a personal relationship. Wanting something to be real and last, but watching it change shape and fade away.
Wanting yourself to be real.
I want to be a real poem - now I'm an erasure - now I'm an erasure of an erasure - am I becoming something smaller?
Or am I becoming something more precisely aligned with myself - am I becoming a different variation of myself - am I getting closer to the real me?
We all interpret things differently, but my mind interpreted this collection as a thought provoking exploration about the erasure of relationships, the erasure of time, the erasure of different pieces of one's own self and one's own existence. Moving backwards and moving forwards in a self-created realignment filled with elements that one can't control but that one can reposition.
Relationships changing, failing, ending, dying. Aging. Impending death. Deterioration of elements that seemed meaningful. Past, present, time continually racing, flying, changing. Memories and remnants and re-evaluation of past time. What was, what will never be the same again, what sticks inside, what changes, gets crossed off, gets deleted or repositioned. What grows in its own directions.
Breaking and putting yourself back together in different pieces. Becoming (and poetically documenting) who you want to be now, before it's too late. It might change again anyway.
The end of this review is my own erasure/re-amalgamation of lines from this collection...
***
"... stale labyrinths - blur out the years - a gaggle of men - broken lovers - tomorrow morning's stupid naked fight - the stale curses of paper dolls in a cheap room - the slow incisions, the skull saved for later - a handful of hours, so many promises made, but a matter of days and - you reach, try to reach across - You could find it again - or is that just an area code from the past - they'll see me but they'll never see me - a tumbleweed swarm of sediment - Somebody bandage up my mouth before I spit out a bunch of rude tulips - the rules spilled - hot knives on the radiator - I won't give up..."
Displaying 1 of 1 review