Joshua Beckman

Gentle Reader

Erased page

year unknown

Gentle Reader!

I was alive
Sometimes
I looked…

A collaborative book of erasures of Romantic era texts by Joshua Beckman, Anthony McCann, and Matthew Rohrer.
6 x 8.5 inches
68pp, paperback
Published by Wave Books


< Artists + Writers


Joshua Beckman, born in New Haven, Connecticut

Joshua Beckman is the author of many books, including The Lives of the Poems and 3 Talks (Wave Books, forthcoming 2018), The Inside of an AppleTake It, Shake, Your Time Has Come, and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is editor-in-chief at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Micrograms, by Jorge Carrera Andrade, 5 Meters of Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) by Carlos Oquendo de Amat, and Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008) by Tomaž Šalamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He also co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books, 2015)

“It’s easy to imagine that erasing is the political act because it can be seen as so assertive (people always imagine it is a resistant act), but the erasures seem to me to be the remnants of a more communally involving experience—the growth in our intimate space of an intellectual, spiritual, imaginative, and philosophical context that was expansive and liberating.”

– Joshua Beckman on Gentle Reader! (Wave Books), his collaborative book with Anthony McCann and Matthew Rohrer involving erasures from the canon of English Romantic poetry.