Matthea Harvey + Amy Jean Porter
Of Lamb
2011
Published by McSweeney’s (July 5, 2011)
Hardcover, 120 pages
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Matthea Harvey, born 1973, lives and works in New York
“Matthea Harvey is the author of three books of poetry: Modern Life, Sad Little Breathing Machine, and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, as well as a fable for adults and children, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel.”
– McSweeneys
“Of Lamb is a collaborative project between poet Matthea Harvey and artist Amy Jean Porter. Harvey was fascinated by the process of erasures after seeing Tom Phillips’s A Humument and Jen Bervin’s Nets and decided to do one herself with the first book she could find for three dollars. ‘I picked up A Portrait of Charles Lamb completely randomly,’ Harvey told me. ‘When I discovered that Mary and Lamb were on each page, a story in poems started to emerge.’ There are echoes of Sarah Josepha Hale’s famous nineteenth-century rhyme ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ which tells the story of a young girl named Mary Sawyer who brings her pet lamb to school. But there are also weirder, more fascinating moments, too: ‘Nerves his family / Trouble his home / Dark spirits his company.'”