August Poetry Book Club

Made up largely of erasure/blackout poetry, Quenton Baker writes that this collection is an act of violence against the original texts they use for its source material. In the book's front cover, they include a note:

"The first 94 pages of poems are redactions of Senate Document 51 of the Second Session of the 27th United States Congress in 1842. The document contains letters back and forth from the United States and British consulates in the Bahamas and sworn depositions from the white crew aboard the Creole. It was on that ship, in 1841, that 135 American-born enslaved people revolted and were able to escape chattel slavery. It is the only large-scale revolt of American-born ensalved peoples that did not end in capture, torture, or capital punishment. There is no known recorded speech or testimony from any of those 135 people."