‘Slugs, Soft Meat, & Just One Person’
— Hannah Cohen
Marcel Duchamp once stated that “[i]t’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap”, and it’s with this philosophy that I approach erasure poems with such fascination and joy. As a long-time fan of both Stephen King’s work and the craft of found poetry, I enjoy when writers add and subtract new meanings to an established text.
In these three erasure poems by Sara Adams, the story of a literal child-eating monster transforms into something else entirely—in ‘Slugs’, the mind is “like a thousand // slugs”, and ‘Soft Meat’ is darkly comedic in its arrangement of “bad dreams // dressed in corduroys”. The last poem in particular, ‘Just One Person’, is affecting in its resignation and lack of belief. Fun and shocking to read, Adams’s erasure poems personify our fears and anxieties in clever twists much like the master of horror himself.